After years (and years) running literacy interventions and supporting GSCE Englishes, I have nothing to do with that now in my role (obvs literacy is everyone’s job but you know what I mean). I still like to read around and engage with English PD and pedagogy – something I’m increasingly aware feeds into how pupils work in art, particularly as our KS4 haven’t done English Lit this year and it turns out I reference literature analysis skills A LOT and they really can forget how to do it #BringBackPoetryAndShakespeare. Anyway, I often pick Englishy sessions at conferences and yesterday was no different as I was speaking at the Teaching and Learning Leeds conference held at The Grammar School at Leeds.
Chris Curtis used his #TLLeeds23 session to speak about the importance of inference in reading instruction and what his school have done to approach this. Lots of schools have launched into obsessions over vocabulary and are increasingly looking towards fluency, but Chris argued that for students to be genuinely engaging with what they read, we really need to be focussing on inference.
One of the problems he highlighted was that a lot of reading is about the exam – ‘here’s the question, read the text’ stuff – and this changes the way students read. Those getting grades 2 and 3 are merely skimming and scanning for easy answers, not actually reading the text. It struck me that it’s exactly the same for my grade 2/3 art pupils – they’re skimming and scanning when they see an artwork. What they need is to develop their inference skills for ‘reading’ art in the same way they need to for reading texts.
Chris was clear that he wasn’t just talking about reading in English, and offered ways to adapt the theory and approach in other subjects; but I’m not talking about reading text in art. Reading text does look different in Art and I’m interested in how to make this better, but inference in art doesn’t just come about from texts, it’s central to evaluating pieces of art themselves, and I wanted to think about using Chris’s ideas about approaching texts to support students with making inferences about artworks.
So let’s go through some of the stuff Chris talked about and where I think it could work with art engagement.
He used Anne Kopal’s 2008 work on Effective Teaching of Inference Skills for Reading (pdf) to give an outline of the different types of inference he would be talking about.
What is being connected?
Coherence inferences – within a sentence, like switching to using pronouns once someone has been named; they need to know who the pronoun refers to.
Elaborative inferences – drawing on their own experience or prior reading to make connections between sentences
In analysing art, coherent inferences could come from identifying different features of an artwork, describing individual elements. Elaborative inference would involve drawing on knowledge about an artist, when a piece was made, other works by the same artist perhaps.
Where in the text?
Local inferences – sentence or paragraph level inferences (coherence as above, connecting actions to causes etc).
Global inferences – looking at a text as a whole and using local inferences to identify overarching themes.
In art, this could be the difference between focussing on particular elements or techniques within a piece, and combining these to evaluate how these make up the work as a whole.
When in the reading process?
On-line inferences – drawn automatically as a student is reading, in the moment.
Off-line inferences – drawn after reading, through retrieval or when engaging with further information.
For art this might be about an initial ‘reading’ of an artwork and making connections to further artworks, or even themes in their subjects that add to their interpretations and understanding.
Approaching the text
Chris went through several examples of how to approach a text by activating students’ prior knowledge and scaffolding the process of reading a text to explicitly make inferences. He talked about tethering their knowledge to simple ideas such as whether something might be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing, based on what they already know – rather than try to overload them by pre-loading them with too much pre-teaching. He discussed his process of first summarising (local inference) before looking at the whole piece (global inference) when approaching fiction texts, and how they change this for non-fiction to identifying feelings (to force inferences) before thoughts (avoiding personal opinion).
His example from geography used an image as a stimulus and moved through a sequence of initial thoughts, to slowly revealing pairs of key vocabulary words to build knowledge (coherence and local inferences) before introducing supportive text-based material (elaborative inferences) and then asking pupils to elaborate and rationalise their conclusions (global inferences).
The use of an image as the stimulus was an obvious connection for me with art and offers a guide for how it might work in practice.
Let’s use something we’ve all seen before and consider how a student might approach it.
My grade 2/3 student would perhaps select it for a project on ‘time’ or ‘dreams’ or maybe something like ‘change’ if we’re getting more interesting. They’d see the clocks, try and copy them, do a print, take some photos of pocket watches… It’s OK but fairly formulaic and definitely ‘skimming and scanning’. Now let’s try and tease out some inference.
1. What can we see? (Local inferences into global inferences using elaboration)
- Several melted clocks with a branch and cliffs and water in the background, could be a beach.
- The clocks look like old fashioned ones so it could be an old painting.
- One clock on a bare tree. Bare trees are often dead.
- Fly on one clock and ants on another. Flies hatch on dead bodies, ants crawl over things looking for food.
- If it’s a beach, the white thing could be a beached whale. It looks like it has a large closed eye.
- Perhaps it’s about death and the clocks have stopped and life is fading into the distance.
2. Introducing vocabulary pairs to develop explanation.
- Cool – Warm
- Portrait – Landscape
- Foreground – Background
- Shadow – Light
- Distorted – Accurate
3. Introduce supporting (text?) information
- Movement: Surrealism – it’s not real, the things don’t necessarily belong together?
- Title of artwork: The Persistence of Memory – it’s in the mind, a dream, a memory?
- Year: 1931
4. Rationalising/ Elaboration
This is where they might move away from their more literal interpretations for their projects and start to open up some more sophisticated themes…
- Time – running out of time, memories, past, present, future
- Dreams – hopes and dreams paused through fears, nightmare, reaching for the light, landscape that is a portrait of someone’s mind, post WWI shifts in dreams
- Change – hard to soft, light to dark, life to death, hopes to fears
As a project moves on, the on-line inferences are used to develop off-line inferences and built into project themes. Maybe they’ll use this to make off-line references to something else.
Finally, we use (as Chris talked about) their deeper use of inference to promote complex thinking, hypotheses and supposition – eventually to the point where we promote macro-thinking and they can discuss flaws and contradictions within and between pieces.
It all seems pretty obvious, but it’s really hard to unpick a process that you find so automatic. Making your thinking visible is a crucial part of modelling, and I hope I’ve shown that the framework Chris and his colleagues have developed for doing this with text is adaptable for thinking about it in art. I’m certainly going to put some more consideration into how this can be supported, and I’ll certainly keep going to the Englishy conference sessions.
Impression That I Get 