Looking to Write: Students Writing Through the Visual Arts

Breathe new passion into teaching writing. Teach it as an aesthetic experience. Have your students of writing start with art.

Mary Ehrenworth particularly appreciates the meaning and inspiration the visual arts can afford the writing process. An art historian turned literacy consultant, she conducts workshops that use visual prompts as tools to help students locate significant things to write about and craft beautiful writing in response. She also helps teachers discover new possibilities for themselves as curriculum developers and storytellers.

Each of Ehrenworth's chapters describes one way to employ visual art in the writing workshop with reasons to do it, guides for trying it, images, and worksheets. Included throughout the book are breathtaking examples of student writing using artworks as starting points for:

• imagining different perspectives and making them real through story
• practicing empathetic imagination to create narratives and poems of desire and loss
• giving imagination play through contemporary mythmaking
• restructuring identities by communing with a particular work.

Ehrenworth has also collected for use with this book full-color reproductions of artwork, links to museums, handouts, and other resources, all available online at www.heinemann.com/ehrenworth.

Look closely.
In the looking, find things to write about.
And in the writing, experience what Dewey called that "delightful perception."
There's no better way to get there than with Looking to Write.

Mary Ehrenworth, Senior Deputy Director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and co-editor for the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Middle School series, works with schools and districts around the globe, and is a frequent keynote speaker at Project events and national and international conferences. Mary's interest in critical literacies, deep interpretation, and reading and writing for social justice all inform the books she has authored or co-authored in the Reading and Writing Units of Study series as well as her many articles and other books on instruction and leadership. You can connect with her on Twitter @MaryEhrenworth.