Visual Learners Guide to Reading

Hey all you Bloggers and Blog Readers, I have two new strategies I think you should try if you have an assigned textbook in a lecture based course. The reading strategy I tried this week is called TART, which stands for Terms, Attend, Read, and Test. I used this strategy in two of my class; Survey of Film History and Transmedia Studio. I found this strategy to be very effective in both my courses. For my Survey of Film History class, I first read through the assigned reading from our Film History textbook. The reading was fairly long in my taste but the text aids such as bolded wording, italics, and side captions helped out a lot. For example, the names of two important directors were bolded as such: “Erich Von Stroheim” and “Cecil B. DeMille.” Once I finished reading, I went back through the text and picked out the terms that seemed the most important. Of those terms, I selected a few that I thought my professor might bring up in the lecture. I gave each of the terms a short abbreviation, which helped me to quickly identify those terms when they were brought up during the lecture. I was surprised, more than half the terms I had selected were brought up during the lecture in my film history class. This was very helpful to me because I could finally see the connection between what I was reading outside of class, and what I was learning in the class. After the lecture I went home and re-read the text once more, just to clarify the main points in the lecture. After re-reading the text, I chose the information that was both in the book and touched on during the lecture and made them into questions. I made a total of eight questions that I thought might show up on the next exam and then answered them myself. This was a very informative process for me because I could see what information I knew very well, and what information I needed to look over and review. For example, I didn’t know all the members of the “Little five,” I ended up having to go back through the text to find that out. If I had to rate this strategy on a scale of 1-10, 1 being not effective at all, and 10 being extremely effective, I’d have to give this strategy an 8.5. It honestly was a very helpful strategy, I liked the fact I could now relate my text to the lectures we were having and connect specific terms from the book to what my professor was saying. I think the abbreviation section could be a little more detailed besides just making short abbreviations, maybe adding mnemonic devices that help the student remember the terms while they’re in class, but otherwise it worked great. I really felt prepared for my next exam after writing up the questions I had, it gave me a very realistic idea of what I knew and what I still needed to cover. Being a visual learner I chose this strategy so I could have a visual way of representing what terms I should look for in my lecture and seeing what questions I needed to focus in on. In my Survey of Film History, we are mostly graded on our journals and our exams. To me, the reading and the exam is the hardest parts of the class, so I wanted a strategy that could cover both area’s of concern and help me to feel less stressed about the exam when it comes time to take it. I think this strategy helped me to engage the text in a different way, I read through it looking for terms that I found important and that I thought would show up in a lecture, so It really helped me get through a text that normally I’d have a lot of trouble getting through. This strategy worked well for me in my Survey of Film history class.

I also used the TART strategy in my Transmedia Studio class. Every other week, we’re assigned a reading from my Professors choosing. Most of the time, the readings are not really long as they are very complex and dense. Most of the time, I have to re-read the article or text three or four times before anything even makes sense to me. I found the TART strategy to be especially helpful in the reading “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition” by Rosalind Krauss. Once I read it a few times for clarity, I began to write down terms that I found interesting or thought were relevant to our next lecture about modernism. After selecting the terms I created abbreviations for them to help me identify them when taking notes for the next lecture. Next I attended the lecture, which was very interesting actually, my professor made it very visual by using a lot of drawings and diagrams to represent the art history in the past. After the lecture, I kept track of all the main points and arguments my professor made, along with any terms I selected that he brought up or used. After the lecture, I came back to the reading and identified potential exam and or test questions that he could ask based on the reading and lecture. Since my Transmedia class doesn’t give exams, I decided to adapt the questions part of the TART by adding a part called “How these terms could be applied to my artwork.” So for example, one of my questions was “What is Kitsch Art? How can I apply this?” And what I did is first defined what Kitsch is, “Imitation art that tries to be Avant Garde” and then described how I could apply this idea to my own art: “I can keep this in mind when I’m producing my photographs by trying to shoot what has never been shot before, like shooting in a style that is purely my own creation.” I found this adaptation to be very helpful in that now I could apply the information I was learning in the readings and in the lectures to impact and improve my own art in the future. I think I’d rate this strategy for Transmedia studio a 9 out of 10. I think this strategy was very effective in helping me connect my readings, to the lectures, and ultimately to my artwork. Since I’m a visual learner, I selected this strategy for my Transmedia class because I wanted a way to visually see how my readings, and lectures could affect my thought process and understanding of art, by creating a way to show how it affects the art itself. Since we don’t have graded exams in my Transmedia class and our grade it mostly comprised of what we do with our artwork, it is important to ensure that the work I am creating is sufficient and shows signs of improvement in relationship to our learning of new material. If no improvement is made in the clarity of what we are trying to say, then it is apparent that we may not be learning the information in a useful way. In order for me to learn in the course I have to make sure I’m paying attention, taking notes, and full understanding the readings we are required to read. Overall, I think this was a very helpful and effective strategy, both in my Survey of Film History course and in my Transmedia studio course.