Using pictures: the fundamentals

"Innovation is only bound by a failure to see the fundamental principles."  I keep coming back to Katie Salen's quote, especially when people accuse me of being creative. 

Right now I'm teaching a course on using didactic material and I was asked to do a lesson on how to use pictures, so let's see what pictures are...fundamentally.

Pictures are either drawn or real (photos).  These are not  absolute categories, but rather ends of a spectrum; before the invention of the camera, the job of a good artist was to make pictures that were as lifelike as possible.
Pictures are either still or animated (think movies and cartoons), although a series of stills can tell a story as in comics.
Pictures are either representative or abstract.  These are also malleable categories: think of children's drawings which are meant to be representative, but sometimes it's hard to tell of what.
Pictures show nouns (people, places, thing, animals), verbs (action verbs or stative verbs), adjectives and adverbs. 
Through these parts of speech, they can represent concepts.  For example, peace can be represented by a picture of a dove or a person doing yoga.  War can be represented by a soldier running or a gun firing.

With these basic concpets in mind, let's look at three activies for exploring how we can use pictures.

The first is part of speech snap: each student draws about 12  separate pictures on cards representing nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs (stick figures will do).  They play snap by turning over their cards at the same time and yelling "snap" if they match.  For example, a dog and ice-cream are both nouns.  However, there might be some overlap: for example a dog running and a person eating ice-cream can represent either nouns (dog, person) or verbs (running, eating) or even adjectives (loud, delicious).  Therefore the winner would be the first to yell "snap" and justify why.  That player can then take all of the cards on the table.  The game ends when there are no more cards to play and the winner is the one with the most.

The second activity focusses on pulling the parts of speech into a narrative, in other words byusing pictures to enhance a story.  There are two ways to do this: focussing on the story itself and using the pictures to illustrate it, and focussing beyond the story, for example, finding pictures of the character as he or she might have looked as a young child, or of the house the character might have grown up in, or even pictures of the character's favourite drink.

The third focusses on compling these nouns and verbs into a system by showing the relationships between them.  For example, a collage about bullying would focus on the different points of view of the aggressor, the victim, the bystanders, perhaps the teachers or authorities, as well as focussing on the links between all of these people and the causes and effects of bullying.  (Part of this idea comes from Quest to Learn Systems Thinking Design Pack which can be found at http://www.instituteofplay.org/work/projects/q-design-packs/q-systems-thinking-design-pack/)