Vineland teacher presents at national conference
Vanessa Rasmussen, Advanced Placement/Honors English Teacher and English Department Chairperson, presented a session in July at the National Advanced Placement Conference in Anaheim, Calif.
The annual event, known as the largest professional development gathering of the AP program, attracted several thousand AP educators and administrators from around the country for an exchange of ideas and best practices. Rasmussen also presented at last year’s conference in Austin.
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Rasmussen’s presentation, “Visual Savvy: Working with Images as Texts,” focused on how to work with visual texts: artwork, advertisements, charts, graphs, political cartoons, infographics – any text that has a visual component, or any visual that presents an argument.
“AP English Language and Composition is all about effective argumentation; students need to be able to present their ideas as a clear argument, and they need to build those arguments with strong, supportive sources,” said Rasmussen. “Learning how to work with written sources is a major focus of the course, but learning how to work with visuals is a skill that needs to be taught as well, since information presented in a visual format can offer strong support to arguments if you know how to use it.”
In her presentation, Rasmussen highlighted how these skills are taught at Vineland High School and explained how the same techniques can be applied at other schools. As she explained, one of three essays on the AP Exam specifically includes a visual text as one of the sources that students are required to synthesize into an argumentative essay.
“Students need to learn how to analyze and discuss images, and how to relate them to other texts,” Rasmussen said. “Sometimes this requires teaching some discipline-specific vocabulary – we learned quite a few visual art and documentary film terms this year for different units – but the payoff is immense.”
“It was a fantastic professional opportunity to represent VHS with my own conference session presentation and to learn more deeply about AP topics and techniques from colleagues across the country,” said Rasmussen.