The House of Illustration intends to introduce the world of illustration to the widest range of people. To enhance the experience, a learning programme will provide workshops for schools, community groups and students. There will also be a programme of talks, events and workshops for the general public.
We’ve been working with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to explore the role that illustration plays in the classroom. The aim was to produce teaching materials that could be downloaded from our website and used in the classroom.
We held a joint workshop on 7 July 2008. The day was introduced and the group work facilitated by Jo Shackleton, Schools Standards Adviser at the DCSF. Flora Craig, the House of Illustration’s Project Director, gave a brief overview of the museum. The illustrator Quentin Blake talked about ‘What an Illustrator Thinks About’ – looking at issues such as how an illustrator responds to text, how s/he collaborates with an author, and how style and medium can reflect and add to atmosphere in a book. Ghislaine Kenyon, an arts education consultant, asked the group to critique the illustrations in Annalena McAffee and Anthony Browne’s book ‘The Visitors who Came to Stay’, considering ideas such as how illustrations create atmosphere and how different readings of them can illuminate the experience of looking. The participants then worked in groups with a number of texts and were given the opportunity to share their practice, discussing illustrated books that have worked well for them in the classroom and suggesting criteria by which books can be judged.
Video clips from the workshop are available below:
Ideas for using illustration in the classroom:
Four books were examined in detail during the workshop (‘Clown’ by Quentin Blake, ‘Mythological Monsters’ by Sara Fanelli, ‘Beegu’ by Alexis Deacon and ‘Macbeth’ the graphic novel), and the groups suggested learning activities based on them:
Suggested texts - suggested teaching approaches (Word Document, 40kb)
The workshop participants came up with a list of criteria for judging an illustrated text:
Toolkit 1 - Judge for yourself! (Word Document, 32 kb)
Ghislaine Kenyon has also written a toolkit to help teachers to work with illustration in the classroom:
Toolkit 2 - Looking (Word Document, 32kb)