Whether we subscribe to a specific learning style inventory or theory of multiple intelligences, almost any educator would admit that different students respond well to different kinds of lessons and assignments. Over a few semesters of teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), I’ve tried to accommodate FIT students’ overwhelmingly visual styles of learning (an intellectual orientation, I should add, that I don’t particularly share).

Recently, for a major assignment, I asked my students to create illustrations for either the novel City Crimes (1849) by George Thompson or the short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe. Then, I asked them to explain their artistic choices in a brief essay and present the illustrations to the class.

I felt a little apprehensive about devising such an assignment, because I feared we were sacrificing some course objectives (improving students’ critical reading and writing, for example) in favor of more richly reaching others (such as interpreting literary texts with innovation and creativity). But here’s what surprised me about my students’ responses to this assignment: the creative component actually improved students’ critical and analytical skills. Never before had the students referred so directly to different passages of the texts and offered such bold and risky interpretations of some themes.

Some students have been kind enough to give me permission to share their work on our blog. Here are a few:

Tara’s “Ragged Mountains”

It’s no surprise that Tara, an illustration major, excelled in this assignment; students gasped in astonishment as she unveiled her artwork. (More of Tara’s work can be seen on her website.)

Tara told the class she chose unrealistic colors for the scene above in order to reflect the effects of the morphine the protagonist, Bedloe, had just taken.

Tara explained that when Bedloe sees a hyena, rebelling Bengalis, and an Indian cityscape in the mountains of Virginia, it feels strange and disorienting, but also seems real to him. That’s why she made the figures detailed but distant from Bedloe (represented in silhouette because of his underdetermined character).

Olga’s City Crimes

After apologizing that she is decidedly not an illustration major—an apology that seemed beside the point, after seeing her masterful illustrations—Olga explained that she chose black and white in order to reflect the novel’s bifurcation between dark and light, good and evil; the color red represents “blood of course” (it is an extremely violent novel), as well as the vivid consequences of the characters’ actions.

Of the illustration below, she wrote, “By showing the two ghosts on both sides of her bed, I wanted to portray that she is being haunted by her demons. They eventually catch up to her and make her commit suicide out of fear of shame and capture.”

Rose’s City Crimes

Rose, the only student to use cut-and-paste collage on paper, explained, “I used newspaper for the tree because I thought from this point on, everything was ‘sudden news.’ It is supposed to represent all of the little secrets that grow.”

In the collage above, Rose used a piece of a New York City subway map to reflect the novel’s urban setting, and explained that “the characters in this picture are not facing each other because their love is a sin.”

So Hee’s “Ragged Mountains”

So Hee wanted to emphasize the protagonist’s “loss of free will,” and she found some ingenious ways to represent that graphically. In the illustration above, she explained, “he is under hypnotism by Dr. Templeton, so you can find Dr. Templeton watching over Bedloe on the top left corner, observing what’s happening to him.” She added, “As he descends to the city, he uncontrollably flows with the crowd to where they lead him, not being able to even think for himself.”

I was most excited to see the illustration assignment empowered some students to challenge my interpretations of the course texts. So Hee, for example, first reminded the class what I had taught them: that the story links British imperialism to American expansionism. But, she said, she saw it differently: “England’s occupation and imperialism in India correlate with Dr. Templeton’s authority over Mr. Bedloe’s body and mental state,” she wrote.

All in all, I am very pleased with this assignment. Next time around, though, I will make some changes. Now that I see how connected illustration can be with interpretation, I will make this a more structured and paced assignment with guided planning and drafting, the way I would with a writing assignment. In the future, I would also like to incorporate an illustration assignment like this one into a longer-term collaborative project, like an online illustrated edition of a text.

Earlier this past summer, my wife and I moved into a new apartment.  We spent five years in the previous place, a 400 square foot “junior” one-bedroom.  It was small and seriously deficient in the storage column—one of the two closets served mostly as our pantry; the other one, by the bathroom, housed both of our clothes—but we loved its coziness, spent countless hours being homebodies till we could move in and through the cramped spaces without looking, like echo-locating bat-people.

Cut to the new place, week four or five.  I woke up in the small hours, for the usual reason one wakes up then (i.e., to pee, not to face down phantoms) and crept a stealthy, oblique path to the bedroom door.  The room was dark, so it was only when my outstretched hands touched a hinge instead of a door-knob that I realized I had misgauged.  I felt a bit to the left; opened the door quietly; squinted deeply into an oddly pitch-dark hallway (“aren’t there usually traces of light seeping in from the windows out there?” I thought); gave a bemused, half-sleeping shrug; stepped briskly toward the WC; and was immediately thereafter struck brutally across the bridge of my nose by some heavy, hard object.

The animal in me tensed for a fight with an apparent intruder, but my deductive-intuitive self, in a half-second flash, ascertained the situation: I had not walked into the hallway but into the bedroom closet, running into its eye-level shelf.  This all happened so quickly that I did not even jump back or cry out (my wife slept soundly on).

A misgauge indeed.  In the murky room, I had skewed my path not a wee bit too far right but several feet too far to the left, and then I had somehow accepted that the closet’s impossibly dark void was the path to the bathroom. (If the whole thing had been filmed, it would be a shoo-in for the Fail Blog.)  It may sound strange to say so, but I found this to be a sort of magical event, an exquisitely pure experience of being undeceived.  In spite of the painful purple dent (later unsightly swollen bump) on my nose, I was weirdly exhilarated.  My mind kept revisiting not the force of the shelf-attack but the force of the epiphany that followed.  The thoughts “how could I have been so utterly off track?!” and “how could I have fathomed my mistake so quickly and so perfectly?” were not really commensurable, yet together they constituted a rare, fascinating, crystallized instance of error recognized.

I have since thought how unusual it is to find oneself so dramatically mistaken, so unambiguously wrong, especially in realms of communication.  Most often, speakers or writers fumble and forge ahead in a sort of dusky half-light, doing the best they can, moving with unreflective boldness or with timidity, but in any case rarely bumping into something that might tell them: you aren’t going where you think you’re going or you’re in the wrong room altogether. I hope it’s clear that I don’t mainly have in mind here grammatical errors, discrete glitches at the sentence level, but larger tendencies a writer/speaker might have to move along misguided, counterproductive paths.

As communications instructors, we constantly operate according to assumptions about student error, at least in the pragmatic sense—what works, what doesn’t in a given case—but I wonder how often or how thoroughly we think through the concept itself.  The following passage, from David Bartholomae’s venerable essay, “The Study of Error,” offers a compellingly holistic view of the matter:

“Error analysis begins with a theory of writing, a theory of language production and language development, that allows us to see errors as evidence of choice or strategy among a range of possible choices or strategies.  They provide evidence of an individual style of using the language and making it work; they are not a simple record of what a writer failed to do because of incompetence or indifference.  Errors, then, are stylistic features, information about this writer and this language; they are not necessarily ‘noise’ in the system, accidents of composing, or malfunctions in the language process.”

His point goes to my interest in error as a modality rather than as a discrete flaw or set of flaws.  It also speaks as much to pedagogical practice, I think, as it does to student work.  How often or how thoroughly do we look for the erroneous—that is, the dysfunctional—in our own methods: our responses to student writing, our assignments, our use of class time, our way of speaking?  I mean to invoke conscientiousness as the objective here, not supposed elements of discernible badness.   “Errancy,” after all, simply means wandering.  Thus it can be one of the most exciting, productive ways to read, write, speak, or teach—through heuristic exploration.  It will only function this way, though, when one has a lively, working awareness of the stakes and purposes and ever-evolving options connected to some effort in language.

Running into shelves in the dark is no fun and no good unless you get the compensation of figuring out, each time, what the *&%# just happened.