Interpreting and Reinterpreting Images

Session One

Discuss motives for exploration.

• You may want to begin the class by playing the music and opening lines from Star Trek. Invite students to offer reasons why countries spend great sums of money exploring space. List these reasons on the board. Ask students to speculate on reasons that motivated European exploration of North and South America in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Compare these reasons with the reasons for contemporary space travel. Invite students to suggest other differences between contemporary exploration and early European exploration of the new world; e.g., the new world was inhabited, equipment was less sophisticated, explorers would lose contact for extended periods.

Introduce European motives for exploration.

• Duplicate and distribute copies of Early Contact in North and South America (Background Information) or present this information to the class. Explain that a major catalyst for European explorers' arrival in the Americas was blockage of the established trade routes to the east, brought on by the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Motivated by the 3C's––curiosity, commerce and Christianity––explorers, then traders and settlers, became interested in North and South America. Searching for the spices and silks of the Orient, the explorers found valuable commodities to trade and new populations to recruit to the Christian faith.

Imagine the early contact experience.

• Invite students to imagine what first contact would be like and how Europeans and First Nations peoples interacted in these early encounters. Ask students to individually record a brief imagined scene of first contact; e.g., outline the sequence of events, explain who would do what, describe the participants' feelings. See Imagining Early Contact Experiences (Lesson Material). Save student work until later in the challenge when students will be asked to revisit these initial thoughts.

Analyze a drawing.

• Project a copy of a drawing that depicts a historical scene such as early contact between First Nations peoples and Europeans. See Image Collections (bottom of page) for examples of drawings depicting contact in North America or South America. If the title of the drawing is known, do not reveal it to the students. Limited information regarding the artist can be provided, if known.

Make inferences.

• Ask students to interpret the drawing using W5 questions.
• Use a table such as the one below to record student responses during the discussion. See Analyzing a Drawing (Lesson Material).
• Explain that each of the W5 questions invites an inference––a possible conclusion drawn from evidence. Model the vocabulary of inference and evidence as student responses are shared. To meet diverse learning needs, you may modify the vocabulary by using conclusion for inference and clues for evidence.

Discuss criteria for inferences.

• Explain that some inferences are more plausible or convincing than others. Plausibility is increased when the inference is consistent with the evidence available from the drawing as well as from other information sources. Ask students to revisit their inferences to check for consistency with available evidence. Make revisions to the chart as necessary.
• Suggest that a second criterion for a sound inference is that the evidence is specific/detailed and based on observations. Encourage students to provide additional, more specific descriptions for the evidence. To stimulate students' thinking, pose specific questions in relation to each of the 5W categories. For each agreed-upon answer, add appropriate detail to the initial evidence list.

Present the explicit interpretation challenge.

• Distribute copies of five or six new drawings or images by the same artist or examples that depict similar historical events (see Image Collections). In Session Two, the students will form small groups according to the drawing they examine.
• Provide each student or pair of students with one of the picture studies and a copy of Deciphering Explicit Messages in Visual Images: W5 Questions (Lesson Material).
• Present the first part of the first critical challenge:

Interpret the explicit messages of the assigned drawing.

Explain that students are to interpret their assigned drawing by recording on the chart highly plausible inferences with specific supporting evidence for each W5 question.