(I apologize that this is so late. I have been traveling since midnight on Friday.)Growing up, what were some of your favorite childhood books? Where the Wild Things Are? Possibly a Dr. Seuss book; or, how about Clifford: The Big Red Dog? Hopefully we were all able to experience a "good night" story or two when we were younger. Why did we enjoy them so much? What made these books come alive? Perhaps it was the varied voices those reading to us would use to express different characters. Maybe it was the soothing voice of a loved one rocking us to sleep as they read. Setting these reasons aside, there is a common thread between all of the books mentioned above and probably all of the ones that you thought of in your mind: pictures.
As we were talking in class this week about print, I was thinking about picture books and how I can't imagine life, especially my early childhood, without them. Naturally the question came about, "when and how did picture books originate?" Let's take a look.
Johann Comenius lived in the 1600's and was considered a master teacher by all of that generation. He moved around quite a bit and helped reform and restructure schools in order to help the children receive a better education. As an educator, he was very much interested in the collecting and organization of human knowledge. Like the knowledge institutions that we have talked about in class, Comenius had a desire to centralize knowledge through the use of encyclopedia's and things of the sort. As an educator, he wasn't just interested in teaching but in teaching how to teach; the theory of education if you will. Here are his main points on how it should be done:
"1. Learning foreign languages through the vernacular
2. Obtaining ideas through objects rather than words
3. Starting with objects most familiar to the child to introduce him to both the new language and the more remote world of objects
4. Giving the child a comprehensive knowledge of his environment, physical and social, as well as instruction in religious, moral, and classical subjects
5. Making this acquisition of a compendium of knowledge a pleasure rather than a task
6. Making instruction universal"
Although there are many things to discuss from the
se points, I want to highlight the use of visuals and object association in Comenius' theory. There was a great stress on associating real life objects with words or other symbols that would greatly enhance learning. To this point, in 1657, Comenius published the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, which was "first successful application of illustrations to the work of teaching". The illustrations were done by the same method that I explained in my previous post: block printing. The pictures were carved and "raised up" from the surface of the wood so as to take the ink and then transfer it to the paper or printing medium. (Source)What a revolutionary idea this was!!! I know that for myself I am a visual learning and so I am indeed in debt to Comenius for putting pictures in textbooks. You know that feeling when you are reading a long chapter for a class and you turn the page to find that 3/4 of the page is a picture? How great is that? We can all thank Comenius for that. What other reasons can you identify as to the importance of pictures in print?
Pictures allow us to convey things in print that can't be expressed well otherwise. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all!
ReplyDeleteWow, I somehow missed seeing this post at first! Sorry about that.
ReplyDeleteI think that pictures are crucial to understanding certain things, like anything that needs to be specifically expressed but is hard to describe, like Alicia said. It also gives us a chance to learn from more than one medium at a time, which makes it easier to remember. A definitive picture of a chart will be easier to recall than a description of what the chart says.