New Entries: Learning by Writing and Drawing

Making images is as natural to humans as speaking. In fact, it is a language-a way to communicate, think, express, and explore. When pictures and words work together to create meaning, literacy's potential expands.

The thirteen contributors to New Entries share ways they are working to connect the visual arts to literacy instruction as well as to their own lives. Teachers from elementary school through college take you into their classrooms and show how writing, art, and reading can be combined in different ways in subject areas. You join Peter von Euler and his students on their journey to explore writing through art; get an inside look at how Mary Stein and Brenda Power invite their students to "put art on a scientist's palette"; and learn with Peter Thacker as he explains his process of combining imagery and story in his reading class.

The chapters in this book give you snapshots of whole classes and take you in for a closer look with case studies of individual children. The stories of these teachers and their classroom explorations create powerful practical theory that will invite you to begin your own explorations, starting with some of the strategies explained within these pages.

All of the papers in New Entries were written at the invitation of the editors and are printed here for the first time.

KAREN ERNST's work grows out of her many years as a middle level English teacher and her current work as the art teacher at Kings Highway Elementary School in Westport, Connecticut, where she developed the artists workshop. She also directs a project to help teachers use art and of writing across the curriculum and facilitates a teacher research group that calls itself Community Teachers Learning. Picturing Learning: Artists & Writers in the Classroom (Heinemann, 1994) tells the story of her work in art and writing. Karen Ernst's conducts hands-on, practical workshops based on her belief that learning must be theory and practice, the why and how of learning in order to help teachers translate ideas into their own life and classroom practice. She consults on writers' workshop, teacher research, the artists' workshop and how to infuse art into learning across the curriculum to help meet the needs of diverse learners and learning styles.RUTH SHAGOURY HUBBARD (Ph.D., University of New Hampshire) is the Mary Stuart Rogers Professor of Education at Lewis & Clark College, where she coordinates the Language and Literacy Program. She works with students of all ages, from preschool through adult learning situations, teaching in classrooms as well as conducting workshops across the United States and Canada. Her current research focuses on language and literacy acquisition with diverse student populations.