September 7, 2014

Leslie Armstrong
WIPRO Urban STEM
DREAM IT 2.00000 REVISITED

Introduction
Working with a population of urban students who are generally deemed less fortunate, I
would like to pose a new paradigm. I have spent over eighteen years working with a population
of urban students who are fortunate, though born into unfortunate situations. Education,
particularly the wave of 21st century education, makes their opportunities for success limitless,
despite growing up in impoverished communities and confronting violence much too frequently.
Embracing 21st century skills for success by urban students may not be an instant save for the
deep wounds of their misfortune, but it provides an opportunity for the wound to heal internally,
by providing such students with adequate opportunities to succeed. STEM disciplines, in
particular, require innovative solutions to encourage student participation, especially in women
(Diekman, 1053). As an educator, I am responsible for this internal transformation. Through a
targeted effort to establish an educational teaching method that enhances the learning
opportunities for unfortunate urban students, I will both improve the prospects of such students
and teach practical skills. This effort will be properly monitored, with results being recorded and
assessed to ensure progress and improvement for each participant.
Desired Results
Purpose
One common goal that I have for teachers and students is to build a collaborative community.
The work of becoming 21st century educators that educate students for the 21st century and
beyond is an immense task that cannot be executed by one. In this community, students must
develop a communicative skill set to express ideas and to understand others perspectives. This
communication must evolve into the continued practice of using technology as an actionary tool.
One example of this evolution is visual literacy. While reading is, of course, a fundamental skill
for students, not all students who read, even read well, succeed. Thus, there is some room for
improving student performance, engagement, and collaboration through the development of
other skills. Visual literacy, for the purposes of this project, is defined as the ability to
understand, form opinions, and depict meaning from images. While literary scholars construct
images from readings and text, visually literature individuals read from images. As part of a
STEM curriculum, visual literacy is important for the understanding of graphs, charts, images,
photos, and other forms of visually represented data and information. Reading images, even if
only photos of rock formations or plants, aids in the development of a students ability to
interpret his or her own surroundings and to actively, and even analytically, engage with such

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surroundings. The development of visual literacy in children is, thus, essential for success in
STEM.
Knowledge
Developing visual literacy as part of a STEM curriculum includes a rather wide variety of
skills. As the number of post-graduates in STEM fields decreases (Chen, 14; Hill, Corbett, and
Andresse, 77), it is crucial to develop important skills for STEM in students early on. Being able
to interpret mathematical data, distinguish subtle differences in color tones in plants, and so on
are connected only in their relation to STEM and visual stimuli. Some skills that are included in
visual literacy require that students know rudimentary mathematic skills, while others require
students to be able to identify certain patters found in nature or otherwise. At the core of visual
literacy is active engagement with visual stimuli and the development of associations between
objects, actions, and ideas. In some sense, a plethora of knowledge is applicable to visual
literacy. After all, observing a rocket being blasted off into space is very different for someone
who has long studied the mechanics behind rocket propulsion. Such a scientist or scholar would
have a much clearer understanding of the precise force required to propel the rocket into space.
However, for the purposes of this project, prerequisite knowledge of facts, theories, and opinions
is not the aim. Instead, in attempting to foster the growth of visual literacy in students, this
program will seek to develop an understanding in students of the associations between visual
stimuli and a number of other factors, such as ideas and data. These associations are the
knowledge that this program will seek to teach.
Methods
Prior to the conclusion of the year, students will assessed based on the quality and
quantity of artifacts they have compiled within their digital portfolios. Their artifacts must
correlate to the previously stated objectives. Rubrics will be used to evaluate student artifacts.
In order to gage my success with STEM coaching students that I teach directly and indirectly, I
would analyze the data gained from the scores on their rubrics. For example, if students are
required to use audio technology to enhance a meme, and the quality of the audio is poor or
nonexistent in the majority of their work, which is a direct indication of reteaching to achieve
student success. This may also be an indicator to analyze the mode, frequency and opportunity
of communication between student and teacher. Another key focus would be gathering biweekly attendance data for specified classes. Student attendance is directly connected to their
experience and interest in education.
More specifically, the methods that will be employed to teach such students involve
active engagement with visual stimuli and discussing such stimuli with students. Students will,
of course, be required to produce visual stimuli on their own, further developing their own
understandings of the intentions behind visual stimuli or the intentions behind the ways in which
people study the data gathered from or inspired by visual stimuli. Engaging with the visual
stimuli will encourage critical thinking, especially as it applies to interpreting and reading visual
stimuli. Predictions, hypotheses, or judgments, depending on the given field of STEM, will be
determined by the urban students, in an effort to encourage active engagement. The students will

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develop both an inspiring appreciation for the fields that they find most interesting and a
knowledge base of associations between visual stimuli and the factors mentioned earlier.
Forms
The forms in which this knowledge is represented come through only during
engagements or reflection about such engagements. That is, knowledge of the associations
formed between visual stimuli and data, predictions, and other factors are only really observable
when such associations are manifested through experience. For example, an individual may be
able to immediately tell that a particular rock formation is the result of a volcanic eruption, but
how could such visual literacy in that particular field be observable without this individual
making such claims upon seeing the evidence? It seems impossible. Thus, visual literacy must be
observed directly, rather than quizzed or tested for.
Determining Acceptable Evidence
Determining whether a program successfully teaching or developed visual literacy
requires first identifying acceptable evidence. As mentioned briefly above, visual literacy is not
measurable without direct engagement with visual stimuli or visual experiences. Also, testing for
visual literacy can hardly be done without visual stimuli. Thus, measuring visual literacy should
be attempted through means that require students to actively engage with visual stimuli. A test in
which students fill out multiple choice answers does not seem appropriate here. Better, it seems,
would be to measure the products, or artifacts, produced by the students. The production of such
artifacts is a demonstrable application of visual literacy. But the mere quantity of artifacts
produced by students should not be the only measure used to determine the gains that the
students have made in visual literacy. After all, while students who have further developed visual
literacies will likely be able to produce more artifacts than students who do not have such
developed visual literacies, the quality of the artifacts should also be considered a measure of a
students visual literacy.
Measuring quality of artifacts produced as part of visual literacy exercises is not simply
task. In fact, it may be difficult to keep this process entirely objective, with any interpreter of the
qualities of artifacts necessarily including at least some subjective judgments about such
artifacts. Better is constructing a set of objective criteria for each field or area in which the
artifact belongs. For example, for artifacts that depict rock formations in a way in which the
student intends to demonstrate a limestone formation, a set of objective criteria should be written
down before-hand to determine how accurate the depiction is. As long as there is significant
accuracy between the depiction of the limestone created by the student and the objective criteria
set forth by an authority in the field, representative of actual limestone formations, then the
artifact should be considered to be of at least some quality and should, therefore, count positively
towards the presence of a well-developed visual literacy in the student. While this measure of
evidence is, itself, problematic in that it relies on the subjective opinions of raters of artifacts to
determine likeness according to a set of objective criteria to the represented idea, action, or data,
this measure reduces the subjectivity necessarily employed for each judgment considerably.

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However, while this is a somewhat ideal way to measure evidence that students have
indeed developed their visual literacies, for practical purposes this measure would not be deemed
acceptable by itself. Rather, for real world application, this measure needs to be simplified, such
that, both, the creators of the objective criteria need not produce an exhaustive list of criteria for
every imaginable construction or representation and that a rater need not exhaustingly comb
through each criterion to rate likeness to reality. Instead, the creator of the objective criteria and
the rater can be the same person, with only short sets of criteria being required for each artifact
under consideration. Additionally, the criteria creator/rater need not be an expert in any particular
field, but should have an adequate understanding in the greater discipline, such as biology or
mathematics. This will allow the flexibility needed to ensure that, first, enough raters will be
available to rate all of the artifacts that come in and, second, too much time will not be spent
rating artifacts.
The combination of quantity and quality of artifacts will be used to determine how each
students fared. There are a few problems associated with this form of measurement. First, one
may argue that the artifacts that are considered low quality and, thus, not representative of adept
visual literacy are simply creative or artistic endeavors and, consequently, should not be held
against a students overall assessment of visual literacy. After all, time spent making artistic
artifacts is time taken away from making artifacts that are representative of the real world,
whether by look or through data, and, thus, were created using a developed visual literacy.
However, the students will be instructed such that there artistic and creative skills will be limited
and will not affect the results. For example, students may be instructed to create visual
representations of Fibonacci numbers while the instructor explains exactly what these numbers
are. Students will produce works of varying creativity, sure, but it will, ideally, be obvious to the
raters which students were able to best and most efficiently represent the Fibonacci numbers
through visual means. These students will be assessed as having a higher, or more developed,
visual literacy for this particular assignment.
A second problem is that there may be a multitude of other factors that affect both the
quantity and quality of artifacts produced by the students. For example, some students may be
better at math than science compared to other students. This may skew the results for the
production of artifacts in one particular field. Also, for such a project with an active means of
measurement, a number of environmental factors may contribute to the quantity and quality of
artifacts produced. For example, if a group of five friends is joking around during the activities in
which such artifacts are produced, there is a greater likelihood that students in such a group
would produce fewer than average and below average quality artifacts, due to distractions of the
group. However, while there are confounding factors in virtually every study, especially one with
such measures, the environments will be controlled enough to produce reliable results. Also,
because there will be so many opportunities to produce artifacts in a number of different STEM
fields, the results will likely accurately reflect the visual literacies of the students.
Third, because the student participants in this project are from the urban population, it
seems that this measure would only give us a relative view of the progress made by such
students. In fact, with no parallel measure from the general population or any other more general

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sample, it seems that measuring the progress of the students developing visual literacies will only
be relative to one another and, thus, will only have limited applicability. However, this criticism
misses the point of the project. If this project were a standardized exam to determine the
academic placement of the students, then, yes, the criticism would be warranted. But measuring
the performance of the students in their abilities to actively demonstrate their visual literacies for
this project is intended to determine whether the project, itself, was successful. In this sense, the
method of measuring performance is not that of the students, but that of the project and its
designers.
Finally, there is a fear that measuring the quantity and quality of artifacts produced by the
students is not indicative of student visual literacy development. But, again, measuring visual
literacy should be done in an active way. The next best alternative is to have the students fill out
a survey with visual stimuli on every question, in an effort to determine how good each student is
at interpreting the visual stimuli. However, this would turn into a measure of knowledge on
particular subjects, almost all of which was learned before taking part in the project, rather than
on visual literacy. Thus, it seems that the best and most practical way, for the purposes of this
project, to measure visual literacies in students is by measuring their artifact outputs, both for
quantity and quality.
Desired Learning Experience and Instruction
General Solution
The general solution for this project is developing visual literacies in students, through
the active participation with visual stimuli and their associations in the fields of STEM, and
through the collaboration and active engagement with instructors and other students. The ways in
which the students interact with one another and with the instructors is fundamental to the
success of the program in its ability to develop visual literacies.
Context
The context of the solution is a public school classroom, working with high school
students in an urban environment. Most of these students have faced considerable hardships and
will continue to face them. This presents several constraints in this context. The first constraint is
that many of these students do not get along well and often turn to violence to settle disputes.
Thus, the collaboration requirement of this program will have to be effectively monitored to
reduce the prevalence of negative interactions between students. Unfortunately, the students who
tend to engage in conflict the most are typically the students who need the program the most to
get themselves out of the vicious cycle that they have been left in. The second constraint is
resources. There is a limited number of faculty in such urban schools. Consequently, the student
to teacher ratio can get out-of-hand, leaving teachers to implement very basic and general
teaching methods, or risk spending most of the class period keeping order in the classroom.
Most importantly for the purposes of this project, this context has not allowed the
students to adequately develop their visual literacies. Because they have had limited
engagements with visual stimuli in STEM, or even academic, context, these students have, in

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general, underdeveloped visual literacies. All of my classes are in natural sciences and are at the
high schools level, ranging from 10th to 12th grade. The technology infrastructure available at my
school is sufficient to effectively encourage active participation among students. There are
enough computers and a strong enough internet connection to allow each student in my classes to
have a computer during any given hour of instruction. The hand-on and active nature of the
solution presented in this project is necessary, given the context of the learning environments that
these students are presented with.
Content
While the primary goal of this project is to develop visual learning in students, because it
is part of a STEM curriculum, namely a natural science curriculum, it is important for the
students to develop an understanding of particular natural science concepts in going through the
exercises that will produce artifacts. While other instructors in other STEM disciplines will need
to cover other materials, such as those in mathematics, my focus, in conjunction with developing
visual literacies in students, must necessarily be on the development of natural science
knowledge. The ideal goal for my students is that all of them be able to apply their developed
visual literacies in any particular field of STEM, or any particular academic field for that matter.
Specifically, I hope that my students are able to see a desert and determine how long, roughly,
that the current drought has occurred or see a particular cellular formation in a plant and be able
to make several well-informed deductions about the plant. Thus, the content for my classes will
be just about any visual stimuli related to the natural sciences.
There are several problems that I have encountered with students being unable to
successfully develop visual literacies in the natural sciences or just about any STEM discipline
for that matter. Studies show that interactive learning experiences can improve motivation in
STEM students (Springer, Stanne, and Samuel, 36). One of the most prevalent problems that I
have observed is students losing concentration or lacking the motivation to complete tasks that
require active participation. Perhaps, there is a general lack of motivation going around high
schools in learning just about any subject or, perhaps, the advancements in entertainment and
communication technologies may have cut down the attention spans of students so much that if
such students are not highly interested in a subject, other stimuli capture the attention of students.
This is where pedagogy becomes vital in an effort to teach a student a new skill, which will be
discussed shortly. While there are numerous specific aspects of any subject that students tend to
have difficulties in understanding, as it applies specifically to visual literacies, it seems that
students can only handle so much stimuli at one time, until they have become heavily acquainted
with the subject matter. For example, many students fail to notice important details of an image
in the background, focusing too heavily on the foreground, leaving such students with inadequate
information about a particular problem. Having a foundational understanding and knowledge
base about any particular subject can, of course, improve a students ability to apply visual
literacy to a given problem. Moreover, we may even conclude that visual literacy is dependent on
knowledge, discussed in an earlier section. Still, visual literacy can and should be viewed as an at
least partially independent skill that is applicably across a range of STEM disciplines.
Pedagogy

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As mentioned briefly above, taking the proper pedagogical approach is essential for
inspiring students to actively participate, keeping students interested, and encouraging learning
opportunities in students beyond the classroom. For the development of visual literacies in
students, the best pedagogical approach, it seems, is experiential learning. At the very least, this
pedagogical approach relates highly with the instruction mechanisms mentioned here. Also, the
goals mentioned earlier seem to depend heavily on an experiential learning approach. For,
students must have active and engaging experiences with visual stimuli, not simply boring and
typical engagements such as in black and white on a simple sheet of paper, in order for such
students to remain interested, actively aware, and think critically. All of these aspects are, of
course, important in both measuring the success of any attempt to develop visual literacies in
students and successfully developing visual literacies in students. Creating an inviting
experiences for the students is only part of the battle though. It is also important for instructors,
such as myself, to make assignments relevant. Playing video games in class captures the
attention and awareness of students, actively encouraging them to engage with one another, but
without relevancy, such instruction would fulfill pedagogical goals.
For teaching natural sciences, and the STEM disciplines in general, it is important for
instructors to vary content and means of instruction frequently. While I have discussed in detail
the active learning assignments that I propose to develop the visual literacies in students, these
assignments themselves must vary considerably. This is not just a variance in topics or materials
discussed. Rather, there should be considerably variance in the ways that the visual stimuli are
presented. Videos and on colored paper are common and can be relied upon frequently. But just
as important are in-person visual experiences, such as tours and field trips. While these latter two
forms of active instruction are important for teaching visual literacies, they must be purposefully
instructional, rather than simply going through the motions.
To achieve the goals mentioned above, I would attempt to actively engage with students
and encourage active participation by students, as well as interactions with one another. For
students of STEM, especially those who are unmotivated, I would attempt to encourage
participation through incentives. Students can earn rewards for successful completions of project.
On the other hand, incentive programs may actually skew results, as such programs encourage
high quantities of artifacts to be produced, which is one of the measures of performance for
visual literacy. This may allow some students to appear that they have higher visual literacies
than they actually do. Moreover, this may encourage students who would otherwise produce
outstanding artifacts to produce high volumes of low quality artifacts, again, skewing the results.
Technology
Given the importance of visual stimuli in this project, the use of technology should be
minimized. While students viewing visual stimuli on the screen will certainly be useful at times,
as a way to keep students interested, the more natural forms of visual stimuli, such as those seen
in person, should be emphasized in this program. Nevertheless, the use of visual stimuli on both
television and computer screens will add a more rounded dimension to students developing their
visual literacies.

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The Total Package
In learning STEM material, it is important for students to discover the material.
Technology is certainly great at contributing to this experience for students. In addition, the
above mentioned methods for developing visual literacies in students is highly suited for having
students uncover STEM material. Through active engagement and collaboration, students will
discover for themselves what powers cells and what it exactly mitochondria look like in motion
and static. These are the sorts of visual learning skills that I believe make up visual literacy.
Using technology that is content specific will not only develop visual literacies in students, but
will help teach fundamental theories and concepts to such students.
Teaching Demonstration
For a teaching demonstration on the above mentioned pedagogy, learning outcomes and
methods, and goals, a sufficiently varied collection of visual stimuli are required from a specific
subject, most likely Biology. The modes of the visual stimuli will range from being displayed on
computer screens and television screens to being printed on paper with a few visual stimuli being
brought in in physical form to show the students. The students, or teachers, in the demonstration
should all have at least a rudimentary knowledge in science. The demonstration will begin with
actively teaching the students, or teachers, about the specific associations between a few visual
stimuli and important Biology concepts. The students will be asked to identify some of the same
associations in similar visual stimuli. This will help reinforce the importance of the associations
to students, encouraging them to make deductions about the stimuli on their own. Next, students
will be presented with new stimuli and asked to engage with it, in various directive ways, with
students. Finally, the students will be asked to reproduce some of the concepts and associations
discussed during the active participation and engagement with the visual stimuli. At this point,
the artifacts produced by the students will be turned in and the results measured. This is a simply
demonstration that condenses the many aspects of this process into a single sessions. In this
sense, it does not give a full representation of the method to onlookers, but at least gives a
truncated version that the onlookers can form their own opinions about. At the very least, this
demonstration will give teachers an understanding of the concept of visual literacy in practice
and will inspire them to find ways to incorporate its development in their classrooms.

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Works Cited
Chen, Xianglei. "Students Who Study Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
(STEM) in Postsecondary Education. Stats in Brief. NCES 2009-161." National Center
for Education Statistics (2009).
Diekman, Amanda B., et al. "Seeking congruity between goals and roles a new look at why
women opt out of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers."
Psychological Science 21.8 (2010): 1051-1057.
Hill, Catherine, Christianne Corbett, and Andresse St Rose. Why So Few? Women in Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. American Association of University
Women. 1111 Sixteenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, 2010.
Springer, Leonard, Mary Elizabeth Stanne, and Samuel S. Donovan. "Effects of small-group
learning on undergraduates in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology: A
meta-analysis." Review of educational research 69.1 (1999): 21-51.