Pixel International Conferences

This hands-on and visual presentation will engage participants in a grounded discussion of the immersive teaching and lived experiences of a professor and five university level students from the United States during a recent study abroad program. To develop intercultural capabilities in such programs, research suggests participants interact with locals. This educational study abroad program was designed to do this by visiting Italian classrooms to enhance educational observation, participation, and discourse, and to observe the general population in public spaces. Utilizing a wordless children’s picturebook as a teaching tool, these future teachers and Italian school children bridged cultural understandings through personal interpretations of the antics of the book’s characters and the impact of place/location. Where’s Walrus? (Savage, 2011) provided the stimulus for the university students to describe their hometown in the southeastern US, modeling for the children to describe cultural aspects of their Italian locales. These activities interwove academic content standards of literacy (interpretation of illustrations as a storyline, use of content vocabulary, demonstration of oral competency, and artistic representation) and Social Studies (socioeconomics, occupations, recreational interests, history, geography, and natural resources) specific to our different regions. As a pedagogical tool, wordless picturebooks are multimodal texts and therein rely on readers’ attention to illustrative details (design, layout, and composition) to create meaning. The experiential learning that occurred in the Italian classrooms we visited provided both guided and independent reflective observations of the critical and creative thinking processes of over 200 students (ages 7-16). We explored cultural similarities and differences resulting from our inquiries. Due to the wordless nature of the book, language did not pose a barrier to exploration, but rather opened the illustrations and actions of the book’s characters to relate projection to one’s own location. Clearly locale influences the development of understanding of one’s immediate environment to build from place-based knowledge to expand schema of the world through lived experiences. Although this project was conducted in Italy, this mini-lesson can successfully be used almost anywhere in Kindergarten through college classrooms and with multilingual students to expand critical and creative thinking. I invite you to adapt our experiences to fit your teaching.

Keywords: Children’s Literature, Literacy, Geography, Global Learning, Culture;