Seeing What You See

Media Release
April 9, 2009

Seeing What You See

Family effort aims to help students put pictures into words

A new book aimed at teaching visual arts students to write draws on the triple talents of a mother, daughter and son team.

Saying What You See is co-written by Alison Annals, a senior tutor in Arts and Language Education at the University of Waikato’s School of Education; her daughter Abby Cunnane, Assistant Curator at the Wellington City Gallery; and her son Sam Cunnane, Head of Visual Arts at Hamilton’s Fraser High School, who’s also a photographer.

The book is aimed at NCEA level 2 and 3 students and teachers, and is also suitable for first and second year level tertiary students.

“We each came at the project from different directions, so nobody was stepping on anyone’s toes,” says Sam Cunnane. “I’m the secondary school teacher and artmaker, Abby’s the art historian and curator, and Mum’s the teacher of writing.

“The book is aimed at people whose primary method of communication is visual. When I first came into the classroom, I found there was nothing available that did what this book does.”

The obvious solution was to turn to Mum.

Annals has 20 years experience in teaching tertiary level writing, and with Rosemary De Luca co-authored Writing That Works, the textbook used at Waikato University for the Writing for University Purposes paper.

“I’m interested in how people express themselves,” she says. “Writing is often hard for people, and when students tell me that what they find difficult is finding the right words, I say ‘Welcome to the club – that’s writing!’.”

Annals says writing is an important part of the process of making sense of what you think, and points to the visual diaries many artists keep, which often include lots of notes along with sketches.

“Visual artists write things too,” she says. “Our book is an attempt to help art students make sense of what they see, and work out what they think about it. We hope the book will give young adults confidence in both their ideas and their writing.”

Sam Cunnane says Saying What You See is more of a guidebook than a textbook, and he hopes it will help ease the shock many visual arts students experience when they go on to tertiary study. “They tend to be visual thinkers, but at uni or college they find they’re expected to write and write well. Our book will help students cope with that transition.”

Saying What You See is published by Pearson Education New Zealand.

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