Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi. I'm Sid Dobrin. This video addresses the Responding to Visuals project that asks students
to compare photographs of Gabby Sidibe and Aishwarya Rai with the images of each depicted
on covers of Elle magazine. I designed this assignment to serve three
objectives while teaching writing to respond. The first, and most evident, is to provide
students with a prompt that allowed them to practice writing to respond. The second is
to encourage students to think about how we respond to visual information. And, third
to encourage a more critical view of visual culture.
The first part of teaching his assignment is helping students locate the two Elle magazine
covers, which we were not able to include in the book due to copyright and permissions
restrictions. However, the covers are readily available on line by simply conducting an
image search for terms like "Elle cover Gabby Sidibe" or "Elle cover Aishwarya Rai." You
can also find these images and a discussion about them on the Web page four and six dot
com, which is a great resource about photo tampering throughout history developed by
Dartmouth Professor Hany Farid. Once you and your students have been able
to look at the Elle covers and compared them with other images that circulate of Sidibe
and Rai, talk with your students about what it is they will be responding to: the question
of whether or not Elle intentionally lightened their skin tones or not, why they might have
done so, what the implications are ethically for suggesting that Elle tampered with the
photos, what the situation suggests about race, and so on. That is, students will need
to identify what it is they intend to respond to. Along with these discussions, I find it
useful to have students use the Road to a Strong Thesis in order to help them hone in
on a specific claim they wish to identify in responding to the situation. I do this
because often when I teach this assignment, students will fall back to oversimplified
responses like "that's not right" or "who cares," both of which are viable first responses,
but which need to be fleshed out in order to provide a stronger response within the
situation. To this end, I also find that this is a great
assignment to encourage a guided classroom discus- sion about the situation. By having
students collaboratively analyze the situation, perhaps even collaboratively research the
situation, and discuss the situation, I find that students will begin to expand the depths
of their responses beyond the first-response. I do, however, emphasize that simply rehashing
the class discussion in their responses to the assignment does not meet the requirements
of the assignment. The classroom conversation is intended to help them generate ideas, not
to provide them with the final response. As to assessing students' responses, I do
share my assessment rubric with them. I've included a copy of the writing to respond
assessment rubric with the instructor resources for this chapter, so feel free to use that
rubric or adapt it to better suit your pedagogical or curricular needs.
So, those are just a few thoughts about helping students get started with the responding to
visuals assignment. Thanks for using Writing Situations and thanks for watching.