Composing Inquiry: Teachers’ Resources
Teaching Reading: Reading as a Writer

Activity 2: Understanding the Writer’s Moves – subsection (illustrated with Edwards and Winkler)

Reading done in preparation:

  • Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler’s “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons”Students should reread the section headed “The Iwo Jima Image as Visual Ideograph” with its four subsections

Class discussion/activity:

Objective: students concentrate on a subsection of the essay with particular attention to the use of secondary sources, that is, how Edwards and Winkler are summarizing and disagreeing with McGee as a lens for their own analysis. This work sets up the possibility of students using Edwards and Winkler (or McGee via Edwards and Winkler) in their own analysis, perhaps disagreeing with them.

Task: Students will have reread the section with groups assigned to pay close attention to the various subsections: group 1: Ordinary term in political discourse; group 2: abstraction representing collective commitment; group 3: warrants power/guides behavior; group 4: culture-bound. Group members are responsible for looking up unknown terms and references but the main consideration is:

  • How are Edwards and Winkler using their secondary sources, especially their theoretical lens (McGee)?
  • How do they use the evidence of their cartoons to illustrate their own point?
  • How does the point in this section connect with the introduction and conclusion of the essay?

Time: (10 mins) group members meet to compare notes and decide on a paraphrase/explanation to give the rest of the class

(20 mins) group presentations providing summary

(40 mins)whole class discussion – how are they using McGee and other secondary sources? What’s the organizational structure? How do these points connect? What’s their project? How might any of this (the lens or the structure) be useful to you in the analysis of your cartoons?

Next step: see additional follow-up lessons using student writing examples that incorporated paraphrases/summaries

Notes:If you use a class website or discussion board, consider having students post both their preliminary work with definitions of terms and their group summary/paraphrases of this subsection.

One class produced this summary of the four sections:

Four characteristics that constitute the formal definition of an ideograph according to McGee:

  1. an ordinary term found in political discourse – not reserved for political elite, McGee suggests we look at popular culture for such terms not official records
  2. ambiguous term inclusive of many groups, not capable of being empirically verified
  3. transforms questionable actions into something more socially acceptable (as losses in a war are transformed into patriotism or valor)
  4. culture-bound; society’s interactions with ideographs work to define and exclude groups; those who don’t react as expected are excluded or penalized (i.e. called traitors)

© Margaret Marshall Composing Inquiry: Teachers’ Resources Prentice Hall 2008