Image Credit: Mario Tama for "Lens Blog" New York Times
“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education
By Sarah Sussman
Perhaps like many of my students, it was my art and photography classes that taught me how to close read. How does one draw a chain link fence? Slowly creating each gray line allowed me to think about the fence abstractly. Trying to photograph that same fence from different vantage points similarly changed the whole look of the fence, reinforcing that fences could be metaphors; that photos were constructed and had meaning. The time and attention to detail that art requires pairs naturally well with the kind of microcosmic thinking that close reading and analysis calls for. As instructors, we frequently bank on this dual power that visual media has: to make lessons memorable, and to help students to think about problems more abstractly.
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