Educator Webinar: Tapping the Power of Teaching with Visual Images

By analyzing a visual image, students can discover more than just the image’s content–they can also begin to explore its context. Analyzing images lets students discover new topics for exploration and also build visual literacy skills that they can apply not only to primary sources, but to anything they see.

Join us in a webinar

On Tuesday, September 23, at 7 PM ET, education experts from the Library will offer a webinar that will engage participants in a model photograph analysis activity, facilitate a discussion about the power of teaching with visual images, and demonstrate how to find visual images from the Library of Congress.

Throughout the year, the Library will be hosting educator webinars every other Tuesday at 7:00 ET focusing on a variety of instructional strategies for using primary sources in instruction.  The 2014 schedule and information about joining the webinar is now available. In addition to the webinars, we will be hosting Hangouts with subject matter experts from around the Library. Watch here for reminders about each!

Can’t join the webinar? The recording is now available here.

Teaching strategies

Two years ago, Teaching with the Library of Congress published a “round up” of posts on teaching with photographs. We’d like to update that with a few more recent posts to stimulate your thinking about the power of teaching with visual images.

• Point of View in Photographs, part 1; part 2 A two-part blog post demonstrating the ways an artist’s purpose and point of view can shape the way a subject is portrayed.
• Inspired by the work of our colleagues in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, Analyzing Photographs: Child Labor from a Child’s Perspective offers teaching ideas for drawing students in to deeper engagement with photographs.  The post focuses on images selected from the National Child Labor Committee collection, but many of the strategies could be applied to a wide variety of images.
• Helping Students Visualize the Process of Change with Historic Images explores resources and strategies for starting with an image, and then adding contemporary newspaper accounts and current legislation on the same topic to deepen understanding.
• John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and the Power of Surprising Images suggests that analyzing an unfamiliar image on a familiar topic can trigger historical inquiry, raising questions whose answers lie outside the conventional account of an event.

Join the conversation now: What strategies have you used to help your students unlock learning from images?