Using Graffiti as a Reading Tool

By Doug Buehl,
Madison East High School teacher
Member, Wisconsin State Reading Association

May 2004

“Free the Indianapolis 500!”– 1960s slogan etched onto campus kiosks in parody of pleas for political dissidents like the “Chicago 7.”

In unavoidable slice of the reading we’ve done over the years has been incidental – those ubiquitous messages that suddenly appear, like pop-up screens on Internet sites, to arrest our eye and interject a quick subscript into our flow of thought. Such messages are seemingly splattered across our environment: billboards, business signs, blinking appeals in neon lights, bumper stickers.

And, of course, graffiti. Scrawled over a poster, splashed against temporary barriers on a construction site, scratched into a wall or onto a desktop – the itinerant musings of someone asserting a message. The range of these jabs of declaration are seemingly endless, from the whimsical to the offensive, from the idiosyncratic marks of personality to the earnest expressions of conviction, from the scatological to the irreverent to the incendiary.

In a general sense, graffiti represents the superimposition of one person’s thinking onto someone else’ s work. We use the word “deface” to describe this act. But graffiti can also be seen as the grafting of a new “face” onto an existing structure.

It is this conception of graffiti that can be employed as a classroom strategy – personalizing learning through activities that prompt students to put their face on texts created by others.

The Strategy
Encouraging students to create “text graffiti” in response to their reading is hardly a novel strategy. As learners, we all have highlighted, underlined, and annotated texts to impose our priorities onto someone else’s words. When we add our commentary to what we read, we are tracking our thinking about a text and monitoring our understanding.

Step 1: Model how readers “talk to themselves” and “talk back to the author” with a text displayed by an overhead projector. Think aloud as you read, and jot comments in the margin, as well as underline key segments or terms.

This step is especially critical for students, because when they independently underline or highlight, they tend to overdo it, and often cannot verbalize why they selected what they marked. By including marginal comments, you are in effect modeling why certain aspects of the text deserve greater attention.

In previous columns, text coding has been introduced. Annotating a text follows these principles of text coding, but expands upon them by including written responses. Text coding focuses on thinking such as making connections to background knowledge and experiences, posing questions, identifying confusions, making inferences, determining importance, and summing up key ideas.

As you model, solicit from students their contributions to the “graffiti” appearing in the margins. Empha-size that this process is how readers can begin to “own” a text by intertwining their ideas with those of an author’s.

Step 2: Have students continue this think-writing process individually. Provide them with a photocopy of the text that allows wide margins on both the right and left sides, to facilitate their graffiti. An alternative is to provide students with pads of sticky notes to affix their comments to a text that cannot be reproduced.

Point out the usefulness of including the following annotations:

• Enumerating ideas and information by writing numbers and key words for each item in the margin (for example, three reasons for . . ., two results of . . ., or four events that . . .).
  
  
• Listing significant examples, both those presented in a text and those that occur to the reader.
  
  
• Integrating additional information onto charts or other graphics to make them more understandable and to connect visual information to what is discussed in a passage.
  
  
• Noting confusions with a “?”.
  
  
• Creating a marginal glossary of key terms and definitions.
  
  
• Positing possible meanings of key terms if definitions are not directly stated, in the margins.
  
  
• Indicating areas of agreement (“A”) or disagreement (“D”) with the author, and brief reasons why.
  
  
• Jotting down “gist” statements that sum up key segments in the reader’s words, not the author’s.
  

As students begin writing their graffiti on the text, reiterate that this activity asks them to “go public” with their thinking as they read, and allows them to place their personal “stamp” on an author’s message.

Color felt-tip pens are an excellent resource for annotating texts. Researchers estimate that consistent use of color for coding (such as red for main ideas, blue for details or examples) can enhance memory of a text up to 20%. Students can achieve the same effect by using different colored pads of sticky notes.

Step 3: Former Wisconsin teacher Jeff Wilhelm (2001) advocates creating a Text Protocol Form to prompt student observation of reading. Wilhelm creates a two-column version of a text: the left side is reserved for the selection and the right side for a series of lines for think-writing. (Access to a scanner quickly allows formatting a piece into these two columns. Short texts obtained from Internet sites can also be easily recaptured into this format.)

Wilhelm recommends that students notice what they are thinking, feeling, seeing, doing, or connecting to as they read. Students record their thoughts on the lines next to the text segments that elicited these responses.

When students have completed their texts, Wilhelm suggests having them confer to review their comments to see if they can characterize their reading. Did they notice themselves frequently visualizing (seeing what the author described)? Were they generating a lot of questions (wondering about things)? Did they make a number of connections to past knowledge and experiences? How might they describe their approach to thinking about this text?

Posted May 12, 2004