Learning disabilities affect many students in the United States – 5% of the students enrolled in public schools have been officially diagnosed with at least one LD while many more go undiagnosed. There is a certain amount of stigma attached to this label with many individuals mistakenly linking learning disabilities to a lack of intellect or a manifestation of autism (NCLD). In reality, students with LD’s are of normal or above-average intelligence, they simply have trouble receiving, processing and storing information that other people do naturally. While some schools, mostly private and charter, attempt to address these disabilities by varying the teaching methods in the classroom, public schools make little effort in mitigating the struggle that these students face. Standards and test-based pedagogy dominates the public system, leaving little room for alternative methods including visual and oral teaching. In order to assist this under-represented demographic, and to make reading more fun, I’d like to propose a new web and app-based tool to improve youth literacy. Cartoonclopedia would bring together illustrators, artists and cartoonists from around the world in order to build a database of drawings for as many words in the English language as possible.
When a student encounters a word they don’t understand while reading, they’re expected to go look it up in a dictionary. In our current era of ubiquitous tech use, it’s much more likely that the student will look up the word online. If you Google a word with the term “define” in front of it, the first search result is a definition. Furthermore, resources such as Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com offer free definitions for anyone seeking them. Unfortunately, these sites require a revenue stream of some sort, so students get advertised to in exchange for finding a definition for a word. Additionally, both dictionaries and online databases rarely offer context for the definition. Occasionally the definition is followed by a sentence with the word in it, but at least in my experience, I’ve found that the sentences have obscure references and would certainly be difficult for a younger student to understand. Visual learning is a vital tool in children’s pedagogy; children’s books, computer games and instructional toys all illustrate the importance of a visual aspect in apprehending basic reading and writing skills. Even Vannevar Bush states that the human mind “operates by association,” and by offering an image for students to refer to when thinking of a word, we’d create a link to make comprehension easier. Few of these tools for improving a child’s literacy are free, so this restricts their usage to children of middle and upper-class families. Hence, students with LD’s tend to be from lower-income families. This is due to the fact that it is possible to substantially mitigate the effects of LD’s with instruction, but this requires equally substantial time and financial resources from the parents or school. What is missing in this market for instructional tools is a free resource to be used both at home and in school that would help all students with different learning types understand new terminology: Cartoonclopedia.
Cartoonclopedia would be a prime example of what can be achieved through crowd-sourcing in our constantly more connected and globalized world. The Oxford dictionary has about 170,000 words in it and it is generally assumed that our language uses about 250,000 words, so this would have to be a globally collaborative project. I’d aim to begin the project with an educational grant of some sort, whether it be from the government or a foundation which would allow the project to pay the first illustrators to contribute substantial amounts of drawings to the database. The framework for the website and mobile app would be relatively simple and cheap to construct, it wouldn’t need complicated user interfaces nor functionality. In the long run, it’d be ideal to have user accounts so that instructors and students alike could build their own lists of words. Teachers could compile a list of illustrations for the words they thought were the most challenging or recurring in a text which then students would look over before and while reading. Students could save the words that gave them the most trouble in order to return to them later and consign them to memory. In the short run, however, simple access to the database would be more than substantial. We would conduct studies including both surveys to teachers about what terminology their students found most challenging as well as usage of scholarly tools to identify the most commonly used words in school texts to base the beginnings of our database from.
One of the most exciting aspects of Cartoonclopedia is that, since it’s a global collaboration, the illustrations will be from artists with all different types of cultural backgrounds. The project won’t attempt to standardize the type of illustration, we’ll only check to make sure the content is both appropriate and intelligible to younger students. This will result in the proliferation of many different cultural values and traditions: the New Yorker-style illustration about what the word “chore” means might be contrasted with a South American or Indian illustrator’s interpretation of the word “work.” The individuals portrayed in the cartoons will often wear the garb of their own country and reflect their own traditions, as the illustrator won’t necessarily be American at all. In a world where many cultures are being forced to collide at a rapid pace, this would aid the new generation’s understanding and acceptance of the diverse population around them. It will help guarantee that cultural “knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual,” (Bush). Cartoonclopedia would both help students with disabilities have a visual resource to understand what they’re reading, as well as give all students a break from reading to look at something fun (and often funny) while still instructive.
While some picture dictionaries do exist, they’re not widely used, and Cartoonclopedia would work to bring the resource to any individual’s fingertips. The concept behind an illustrated word bank is reflective design, where we see vocabulary, “as alterable rather than immutable.”(Kraus) The images we associate with certain words come from our surroundings: social and media inputs. Cartoonclopedia seeks to furnish students (and all users) with a range of worldly perspectives about what words mean, allowing them more breadth of understanding. Let’s learn and laugh together!
Works Cited:
“What Are Learning Disabilities? | Learning Difficulties.” National Center for Learning Disabilities. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2014.
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 01 July 1945. Web. 09 Nov. 2014.
Kraus, Kari. 2013. Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday (2013), The New Everyday, Textual Cultures.