Teaching with Technology

http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/2007/issue2/fehn.php

My post this week is from my primary journal source, the  Journal of the Association for History and Computing. The article appeared in the August of 2007 issue and was written by Bruce Fehn, a history professor at the University of Iowa. The title of the article is “Powerpoint and Privileging in Teaching American History: Lynching, Racist Collectibles, and the Abu Ghraib Prison Photos.”

The author believes that the availability of information on the worldwide web (primarily images in his context) along with the relatively easy collection and projection of these images using Powerpoint, make it possible to create “visual historical narratives.”  Realize that by “visual historical narrative,”  the author means a slideshow constructed with images that tell the story.  The visual narrative is not supported by written handouts or written Powerpoint slide narratives. The narrative is the visual images.

For technical support for Fehn’s idea of a visual narrative, he looks to an historian named David Staley, who believed that a visual essay employed the same process that historians use when doing traditional research and writing. Basically, they “seek relevant primary sources, discern patterns in the evidence, and then arrange the evidence into a meaningful narrative, strung together by words, sentences, and paragraphs.” Staley believed that the sequential ordering of images “make them a history, instead of merely a haphazrd collection of pictures or gallery of images.”

Using the visual images as a narrative requires the viewers/students to “fill in the spaces between the images to create meaning.” Staley goes on to note that this approach gives the viewer/student greater space for interpreting the meaning of the visual narrative/essay.

Fehn wholeheartedly agrees with Staley and spends a fair amount of time lauding the technological capability of Powerpoint to collect and project images,  change the sequence, put one or more on the same slide, and make it very easy to go back and forth from one image to the next.  He compares this favorably with the olden times of overhead projectors and transparencies.

Fehn then describes his effort at a visual historical narrative. Check it out in its entirety of 75 slides http://www.education.uiowa.edu/research/bfehn/
A word of caution – if you choose to view the slideshow, be aware that the images are visually graphic and culturally disturbing.

He has attempted to show “an argument that white supremacist imagery normalized white supremacy which undergirded terrible acts of racist violence.”  Fehn builds his visual narrative to include lynchings, racist images, and attempts to connect it to the Abu Ghraib (Iraqi prison torture photos). He states specifically: “I intended to project an historical narrative connecting ubiquitous caricatures of African Americans with the horrid crimes of lynching in America and torture in Iraq.”

He presented his visual history  to a couple of audiences and records in this article some of their responses. You should realize if you decide to check it out that he did not lecture with his presentation. He spent approximately 7 minutes showing the images, about 2 to 10 seconds per image.  One thing that he concluded was that there was significant audience participation following the slideshow. He received numerous comments interpreting the slides and sequence.  One thing that was interesting, because it related to one of the questions that I had, was how did the audience respond to the images (5 or 6 out of the slideshow) that tied in the Iraqi prison torture.  Fehn meant the connection to be that “dehumanizing caricatures create conditions for violence at home and abroad, while generating black resistance struggles.”  Unfortunately Fehn’s audience got so involved in discussing the racist caricatures and lynchings that they didn’t get to the Abu Ghraib connection.

I found it a little hard to make the connection to Iraq, but there is no doubt that the images of prisoners in Iraq were dehumanized and tortured, not unlike the African Americans depicted in other slides. You can check it out for yourself by looking at the slideshow.

Fehn concludes by saying that Powerpoint is a powerful tool for use in visual narratives. He also  believes that the visual narratives strongly encourages and elicits audience/student participation. He believes students can use Powerpoint to construct these visual narratives in a similar way that they write papers as assignments.

My reaction to Fehn is that the visual narrative can certainly act as a lightening rod for class discussion, not only about the intensity of the images chosen, but also in the interpretation of what the “writer” is trying to convey.  The pictures make the points, but unlike written language, in my opinion they tend to provide more emotional responses and also can leave the student (and teacher for that matter) uncertain as to what the point is. It is true that student engagement and collaborative learning go hand in hand and visual narratives seem to be an excellent way to achieve both of these goals. At the same time, I do believe the instructor does need to provide some context and background, which is hard to do with only images.

Another observation I had was Fehn’s comment that with a visual narrative his role was not to be a “sage on the stage,” but instead to present the images and facilitate audience/student participation.  This prompted my title for this post: if a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the teacher supposed to say? The answer, to me, was nailed by Fehn: it is to facilitate the discussion about the narrative, not to lead and overwhelm the students. This is sometimes difficult to do in the classroom. When teachers ask questions or ask for discussion and no one responds, the initial reaction is to fill the space with the teacher’s words. As Dr. Kuhta mentioned in her college teaching class, the average time a teacher gives a student to respond to a question before answering it himself or herself is 3 seconds. We abhor silence! Give them more time, don’t jump in is the message! In other words, the message that I got from Fehn was that with visual narratives, you need to facilitate, not dictate. So what does the teacher do in my title question? Basically, present it, kick it off, shut up, and let the discussion flow!