Art to Learn English

ART TO LEARN ENGLISH

By Amy Bautz

Since 2016, I have collaborated with Stephanie Hirschman, an English as a second language educator at Sussex Downs College in Lewes, England, on an ESL textbook tentatively titled Full Color English for Teenagers, Young Adults and Adults. The book will provide practice in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation using visual puzzles. I think of these as paint-by-words puzzles because the unsolved puzzles look like unpainted paint-by-number canvases. In practice, the students use markers, not paint, but watercolor or gouache would also work.

The original concept was Stephanie’s. She selects the word sets and chooses the subject of the puzzles and she writes a lesson that goes with each. Because the learners are also gaining (British) cultural competency, our visual puzzles have iconic imagery like Stonehenge and cream teas. It’s been an enrichment for me to learn more about ESL education.

As the artist in our collaboration, the challenge for me on each puzzle is balancing inscrutability of the unsolved puzzle, image detail, and space for the words, along with aesthetics. I believe that students’ attention is better held with a sophisticated image and I pay a lot of attention to line quality, texture, perspective and composition.

Lesson Solved from Full Color English for Teenagers, Young Adults and Adults (image courtesy of Amy Bautz)

When we first started working on this, Stephanie felt that a correctly solved puzzle should provide an exciting reveal. We worked through several iterations and what I came up with is that the puzzles have emphatic lighting and spatial simulation that can only been seen when the puzzles are solved. It is my hope that the puzzles might be aesthetically pleasing enough that the students keep them when they are finished, possibly even hanging them up in their living spaces. As an art educator at Saint Louis University, my experience is that repeated exposure to lesson content strongly supports learning outcomes.

Articles about our puzzles have been published in ESL journals. Victoria Baxter, who teaches ESL at City of Oxford College, saw these publications and reached out to us in 2018. Victoria’s work is part of Activate Learning, which is funded by the British government to help refugees and immigrants better adapt to life in Britain. She thought our visual puzzles would be especially well suited to teaching Syrian refugees. This student population has substantial learning hurdles: some general literacy issues and also trauma. Victoria thought the coloring activity would allow her students to relax, concentrate, and be more open to learning.

Victoria’s experience when testing visual puzzles in her classroom has confirmed this effect. In addition, Stephanie found that the coloring activity stimulated peer interactions. Research with traumatized learning populations suggests that peer support is very important; some of these learners may feel more comfortable asking for help from each other than from the teacher.

Instead of using puzzles we already have, Stephanie and I have been working with Victoria to create puzzles specifically for ESL learners who are Syrian refugees living in Oxford. My favorite so far is the puzzle of the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford, probably because I enjoy drawing architecture. It is a capitalization puzzle, which requires the learners to first capitalize the words as needed, and then to color uppercase word areas tan and lowercase word areas blue.

Victoria reports that the puzzles are very successful, with an extraordinarily high completion rate and very visible error tendencies that allow the teachers in Oxford to see which vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation lessons need revisiting. Her feedback has been instructive for our textbook project. She has given us an excellent opportunity to assess the efficacy of a mindful, art-based pedagogy.

Stephanie and I will continue to create teaching materials for Syrian refugees in Oxford and we plan to incorporate what we learn to make changes to our manuscript before we send it out to more publishers. We are also seeking funding to support the creation and wider distribution of our visual puzzles for refugee and migrant populations in other locations.

www.behance.net/amybautz

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