did not have much background knowledge upon which you could draw. First, Sharon used a think aloud technique to demonstrate to the students how a novice could still draw meaning from and infer the intended audience for the piece of art. Sharon had limited background knowledge about Kahlo to draw on when attempting to consider the artist’s purpose for creating a painting of a deer, bearing the artist’s own face, struck by many arrows and standing in a forest clearing. While the attempt was unsophisticated, she was able to make sense of some of the artist’s messages to the audience.
Following that attempt, David, who is knowledgeable about Kahlo’s life story and “The Wounded Deer” (1946) in particular, used the same think aloud technique to share his own interpretation of the painting. David was also able to draw on his extensive knowledge of and experience with art and art history. Students were then asked to respond to both Sharon and David’s thoughts while including information about how each person’s experiences and knowledge aided their explanation of the painting. Following this discussion, students were invited to conduct their own think alouds about the painting, with the support of David and Sharon’s modeled think alouds. Several students agreed to attempt to interpret the painting and seemed pleased with their own attempts.
In a subsequent lesson, the students were presented with “Golf Links” (Cleghorn, 1916). This four line poem was selected because of the opportunity it provided for readers to infer about the author’s purpose in writing it and incorporate background knowledge with an accessible text for these reluctant and/or struggling readers. After working in small groups to interpret the author’s purpose and audience, David then conducted another think aloud, similar to the lesson involving “The Wounded Deer” (Kahlo, 1946). The intent here, again, was to model for the students how they could make attempts to identify the audience and purpose with or without background knowledge but that the interpretations were richer with background knowledge. The underlying purpose of this lesson led up to the culminating project of this unit.
In the culminating project, the students chose a topic, an audience, and a purpose for a flyer they would create to persuade their chosen audience to engage in the behavior or thought processes the flyer would support. Students were guided through a planning process by David, Sharon, and Jenny as they created graphic organizers to identify their topic, audience, and purpose. Once students had conferred with one of the three teachers, they then used PowerPoint to create a flyer that demonstrated their understanding of how to effectively use font, graphics, color, and other visual elements to communicate their message. While not the focus of this article, we have included one student’s flyer focusing on encouraging girls to read (Figure 1) and another student’s flyer which attempted to persuade the reader to support gay marriage (Figure 2) as examples of what the students created.
Figure 1: Girls should read: Student poster encouraging girls to read
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