The power of a picture

Pahl and Roswell, by pulling out the "ordinary" aspects literacies: artifacts, habitus, experiences, and identity, point out the complexities of literacy (or rather, literacies).  Literacy is so much more complex than just reading and writing.  The more I learn, the more overwhelming it is, and yet, it's also so exciting to delve into the power that literacies have in our lives.  Artifactual literacy recognizes the power that children bring to their writing.  This power should be valued in and of itself, but it can also help to bridge the gap between students’ existing literacies and academic literacy.  Unfortunately, “many children do not see the relevance of 'schooled literacy'; that is, literacy that is about the kinds of activities that are relevant to school assessment" (Pahl & Roswell, 2010. p. 7).  But I believe that digital storytelling (as well as other things) have the ability to make school literacy relevant and accessible to children.

As I read about reading photographs and visual literacy in Van Horn’s introduction, I started thinking about how visual our world is, and I think that with the increasing importance/essential nature of the internet, that it’s becoming more visual.  We are constantly exposed to photographs, videos, and other visual representations like graphs and diagrams.  Understanding the visual is also so personal.  Pahl & Roswell and Van Horn point out the deep personal connection to things (artifacts), and the ability to read and interpret the visual over the written is inherent to that connection.  For example, my grandparents’ wedding bands that I inherited are much more valuable to me than their marriage certificate even though they basically represent the same thing.  And although I treasure the written things I have—love letters from my dad to my mom, old birthday cards my grandparents sent—there’s not much that can replace a photograph because it “says” so much in such a small space.

(That picture is of my maternal grandparents, Virgil and Essie Claud Mashburn in 1947.  They divorced long before I was born and as a child, I was always in awe of how in love they looked in this photograph.  I could probably spend a lot of time disecting how this simple photograph, and how my mom loved it, helped me to question and later perhaps come to some kind of understanding of the nature of love.)