Ekphrasis and the Internet: Connecting the Verbal and the Visual with Computer-mediated Student Projects in an Undergraduate Humanities Class

In her exploration of ekphrasis, the relationship between visual and verbal arts, Amy Golahny reminds us that references to the interconnectedness of the language of pictures and words date at least from the fifth century B.C. when Simonides said, "as in painting, so in poetry". In the first century B.C., Golanhy adds, Horace said that "painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture". Further consideration of the concept of ekphrasis by Murray Krieger and W.J.T. Mitchell brings our attention to this verbal-visual relationship up to date. However, at the end of the twentieth century, most undergraduate education in the humanities continues to approach these art forms separately or to focus on student-generated text alone for developing and communicating ideas.

The ease with which the Internet now allows students to exchange, create, and manipulate text and images offers new opportunities for engagement with the composing process. Because our goal as teachers of undergraduate writing and literature classes is creative as well as critical communication and because our pedagogy emphasizes active learning processes, we introduce our students to computing in and about the humanities. Dialogic writing within and beyond their classes enables students to enter into new discourse communities and to explore collaboratively the concepts of their courses. Creating, selecting, and manipulating visual images alone or in conjunction with text introduces students to expanded and contemporary composing processes. Publication of their compositions on the Internet provides them with an audience of other learners. They need not strive to be professional poets or painters to be makers of poems and paintings as a way to learn.

Although our students may read Blake at a Website or in an edition illustrated by his own drawings or read Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" accompanied by a reproduction of Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the relationship between the visual and verbal has not been emphasized in undergraduate higher education, where science textbooks are likely to have more illustrations than literature anthologies. How do humanities teachers dramatize the connection between the visual and verbal for our students and thus help our students understand the interrelatedness of the linguistic and graphical arts? How do we revive their own creativity and cognitive skills with words and pictures? After all, our students probably illustrated their own words in elementary school but are seldom invited to do so in college.

New technologies, in particular the World Wide Web, are bringing words and pictures together for us and our students in ways that might bring those connections back to our college classrooms. Document design now extends beyond the one-inch margin requirements of MLA student manuscripts. Instead, our students are learning with us about screens and color and negative space and visual communication as integral to rather than decoration for the word.

We will describe undergraduate literature and writing projects in which student-generated words and graphics are central to communication of ideas. In these projects, publication of their compositions on the Internet encourages students to reflect on the connections between technology and art, word and image, private and public writing, and their own creative and critical processes. These projects give students opportunities to perceive and to communicate visually, orally, textually, kinesthetically - in other words, they provide multisensory learning experiences.

Theoretical foundations for student-generated compositions in this project come not only from Golahny, Krieger, and Mitchell but also from chapters on teaching in Learning Literature in an Era of Change: Innovations in Teaching. Terri Pullen Guezzar ("From Short Fiction To Dramatic Event: Mental Imagery, The Perceptual Basis of Learning in the Aesthetic Reading Experience") applies the theories of Rudolf Arnheim and Allen Paivio, who argue that privileging the verbal over the visual limits our cognitive development and that separating verbal from visual perception fragments our understanding of and communication about literature. Pedagogical theory is featured in "Figuring Literary Theory and Refiguring Teaching: Graphics in the Undergraduate Literary Theory Course," where Marlowe Miller maintains, "Graphics help students conceptualize complex and abstract theories so that they can identify the central concepts and assumptions of those theories."

Two accessible resources for teachers thinking about integrating new media into undergraduate education also are useful for encouraging colleagues to incorporate the Internet as a learning environment and to make computer-mediated student projects integral to the learning process. In Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education: Implementing with Technology, Arthur W. Chickering and Stephen C. Ehrmann describe ways the following tenets can be incorporated into computer-mediated instruction: contacts between students and faculty, reciprocity and cooperation among students, active learning techniques, prompt feedback, time on task, high expectations, respect for diverse talents and ways of learning. Cooperation among students and active learning techniques as well as respect for diverse learning styles all are supported by multisensory student online publications in which students create original works of art or combine text and images to learn and to communicate their learning.

Additional encouragement for teachers and students comes from Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History by Randy Bass, director of the American Crossroads Project, Georgetown University. Bass identifies "six kinds of quality learning" that "information technologies can serve to enhance": distributive learning, authentic tasks and complex inquiry, dialogic learning, constructive learning, public accountability, and reflective and critical thinking. Once again, collaborative student-generated projects are emphasized as effective learning strategies.

Teaching at two quite different types of institutions, Donna at a large multicampus urban-suburban open admissions community college on the Atlantic coast of Virginia and Art at a selective land-grant university emphasizing agriculture, engineering, science, and technology in the foothills of South Carolina, we both have found that opportunities to compose and share text and images has enriched learning for undergraduates. Examples from the work of our own students and of our colleagues' students will demonstrate some ways that novice scholars learn "from the inside out" by creating, selecting, combining, and manipulating text and images in electronic environments.

Using either a live Internet connection (preferable) or files on disk displayed through a Web browser as well as an overhead projector, we will present and analyze student work that illustrates the conjunction of visual and verbal knowledge and its significance for introducing undergraduate students to the artistic life of their community and to computer-mediated composing as well as for fostering their creative and cognitive development.

<http://onlinelearning.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/projects/achalc2k/>

References

Arnheim, Rudolf (1980). Visual Thinking. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Bass, Randy (26 Oct. 1998). Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History. <http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/guide/engines3.html>.
Chickering, Arthur W. and Ehrmann, Stephen C. (1997). Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever. <http://www.aahe.org/technology/ehrmann.htm>.
Chickering, Arthur W. and Gamson, Zelda (1987). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. AAHE Bulletin, March 1987.
Golahny, Amy, ed. (1996). The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and Literary Arts from the Renaissance to the Present.
Guezzar, Terri Pullen (2000). From Short Fiction To Dramatic Event: Mental Imagery, The Perceptual Basis of Learning in the Aesthetic Reading Experience. In Dona Hickey and Donna Reiss (eds) Learning Literature in an Era of Change: Innovations in Teaching, Stylus, 2000, Sterling, VA, pp. 74-86.
Krieger, Murray (1992). Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Miller, Marlowe (2000). Figuring Literary Theory and Refiguring Teaching: Graphics in the Undergraduate Literary Theory Course. In Dona Hickey and Donna Reiss (eds) Learning Literature in an Era of Change: Innovations in Teaching, Stylus, 2000, Sterling, VA, pp. 61-73.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995). Picture Theory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Paivio, Allan (1971). Imagery & Verbal Processes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.