Looking to Write: Students Writing Through the Visual Arts

Breathe new passion into teaching writing. Teach it as an aesthetic experience. Have your students of writing start with art.

Mary Ehrenworth particularly appreciates the meaning and inspiration the visual arts can afford the writing process. An art historian turned literacy consultant, she conducts workshops that use visual prompts as tools to help students locate significant things to write about and craft beautiful writing in response. She also helps teachers discover new possibilities for themselves as curriculum developers and storytellers.

Each of Ehrenworth's chapters describes one way to employ visual art in the writing workshop with reasons to do it, guides for trying it, images, and worksheets. Included throughout the book are breathtaking examples of student writing using artworks as starting points for:

• imagining different perspectives and making them real through story
• practicing empathetic imagination to create narratives and poems of desire and loss
• giving imagination play through contemporary mythmaking
• restructuring identities by communing with a particular work.

Look closely.
In the looking, find things to write about.
And in the writing, experience what Dewey called that "delightful perception."
There's no better way to get there than with Looking to Write.