READING PICTURES THE PATHWAY TO LEARNING

Making freaky flowers and dream catchers, or acting out the life of a tea bag or a paper clip may sound more like play-time fun than educational assessment.

But these activities, carried out by Southampton school-children, form part of an exciting project designed to find out how they interpret visual images, and how these images can be used to help them learn.

Local community arts group Mount Pleasant Media Workshop is involved in a three year study with Southampton Institute and Southern Arts looking at how children between the ages of six and nine see and create images, using a variety of media such as photographs, websites and video.

Project Coordinator Caroline Rackham explains:

"Children today are bombarded with so many images - from computer games and TV to family snapshots and magazines. The Pathways Project is hoping to design a framework for assessing 'visual literacy' so that children can be helped to understand more of the visual information around them, as well as written text".

Currently, children are taking part in the Pathways Project through art workshops at St Mark's Junior School, Townhill Junior School and Mount Pleasant Junior School.

The Project is tracking these three groups of children through three years of school, and also provides an opportunity for helping teachers to use media-based art in the classroom.