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SANIKILUAQ
Teachers in Sanikiluaq and five other communities are teaching literacy by asking their students to 'paint me a picture,' literally.

Paatsaali School student Noah Emikotailak was inspired by a recent lightning storm in Sanikiluaq, painting his experience to be used as inspiration for the written word. - photo courtesy of Mina Rumbolt

The students are taking part in an innovative program called Picture Writing, which was developed by American researcher Beth Olshansky. In classes across Nunavut, teachers are using Olshansky's method to get their students to tell a story by painting a picture, which forms the basis for a story they then craft using Inuktitut and English words.

"It's a way of using art to encourage and elicit literacy," said Paatsaali School principal Tim Hoyt. The community is one of six in the education ministry's pilot program, inspired by Olshansky's visit to Nunavut last year.

"She came up to Iqaluit and showed us how to implement it in the classroom," said trainer Phyllis Ingram, who has also visited the United States to train with Olshansky, and is now touring the pilot communities to train teachers.

"We've integrated this into the curriculum because it's building on literacy skills," Ingram said. "From the painting, they write, and we go through the whole writer's process of brainstorming, writing sentences, developing paragraphs, descriptive writing, bringing out descriptive languages, adjectives and active verbs."

"You're learning how to express yourself about something you've seen or somewhere you've been," said Grade 10 student Ashley Annie Appaqaq. "It's a fun way to learn how to make proper sentences, how to write and how to draw."

For Paatsaali vice-principal Mina Rumbolt, who taught the technique to her Grade 10 students, the results are evident.

"Most people find it difficult to start to write, but with this, they can see their own art and brainstorm what they see in the painting," Rumbolt said. "I think it's a really good value because it teaches them art and how to write Inuktitut and English, and how to make the picture come alive using their own words. It makes the students write better."

The program leads to "a huge improvement in literacy, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and language development," Phyllis Ingram says.

Appaqaq sees the benefits.

"It made me realize that no matter how you picture anything, you can still make a story out of it," she said. "Even though it's a landscape, it's still something special to that person."

And the value of the program extends beyond art and literacy. Teachers can use this technique in other classes, such as science, social science and more. Ingram has recently used it to have students consider the effects of environmental changes on wildlife.

"For example, the pipeline for the caribou, or the thinning ice for the polar bear," she said. "It's so much easier to write and develop a paragraph from pictures than it is to do without a visual. It really caters to the multiple intelligences and diverse learning styles, because some people are very visual learners."

The work also brings students together and improves their social skills through collaboration, Ingram says.

"There is a lot of sharing among the students," she said. "They learn from each other. It builds self-esteem, it builds cognitive thinking, and it certainly builds their artistic skills, which they dearly love. It's very inclusionary for all students and they love to do it."

Ingram has already gone to Kugluktuk and will take the program to Arctic Bay, Iglulik, Iqaluit and possibly Rankin Inlet after Christmas. She will return to these communities later in the school year, and plans to expand the program to other communities next year and beyond.

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