Annette Lamb

This is an amazing book! These two scholars have built a fresh approach to the use of the graphic arts to teach an inquiry method of learning through pictorial representations. This book is an important contribution to what we would usually term as information literacy but in another dimension. The authors explain their entire system using pictures that have obviously taken months and monts to create and have been printed on clay based paper, making the volume expensive but worth the price. Through pictures, the authors take us a tour of what graphic literacy is followed by a review of the types of graphics they recommend that learners create. These graphics include diagrams, illustrations, illustrations, maps, organizers, images and symbols. Then they send us on a visual tour of their techniques they call SCOEW IT!. This model covers storytelling, communication, organization, representation, evidence, inference, and teaching. Then it is on to their skills and strategies where they help learners read and comprehend graphics, analyze and interpret graphics, using and applying graphics, and designing graphics. They help learners create a wide variety of graphics and then teach them their inquiry model of developing questions, exploring ideas, assimilating ideas, inferring ideas, and finally reflecting. Finally they explore different models of how graphics will work into teaching and learning experiences. Having worked to create the idea of Book2Cloud, this author has been enamored with the use of graphics with kids and teens to build and create meaning. It is one more way to appeal to the current generation of young people immersed in a visual world and/or who do not work very well in the world of print. This is simply the best book on using visuals in education we have seen. Well done, practical, useful, creative, thoughtful, and filled with possibility for great new advances in teaching and learning – those are just a few of the adjectives that come to mind. This is the best of the crop we have seen in a long time. Congratulations to the authors and a well deserved must read, must own, must use recommendation from this reviewer.… (meer)