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"A creative process may begin with a flash of a new idea or with a hunch. It may just start as noodling around with a problem, getting some fresh ideas along the way. It's a process, not a single event, and genuine creative processes involve critical thinking as well as imaginative insights and fresh ideas."
-Sir Ken Robinson (2009)
America's Test Kitchen, located just outside of Boston, strives to develop absolutely the best recipes for popular dishes. Staff members test each recipe "30, 4°. sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most-foolproof recipe" (America's Test Kitchen 2014). Inspired by their patience and precision, we decided to develop a teaching recipe that would consistently engage students in open-minded inquiry. In accordance with Common Core State Standards CCSS.ELALiteracy.CCRA.R.7 and GCSS. ELA-Literacy.GCRA.R.8, students would select and weigh textual, visual, and quantitative evidence and reason dispassionately in order to arrive at a unique synthesis imaginatively presented in an infographie. We have begun the process: testing many ideas, observing lessons in action, and viewing student products. As systematic "bakers," we expect to test, adapt, review, and learn from our failures. We invite you into our infographie kitchen to help us create an instructional sequence that consistently yields high-quality learning for students.
Infographiics, Not Posters
Infographics can be engaging alternative products of research because the multimodal format invites students to make sense of complex information by applying multiple literacies. An infographie is a claim expressed through visual metaphor, conveying the creator's fresh understanding of relationships, expressed through a judicious selection and arrangement of visuals, evidence, and text acquired during inquiry research within a discipline.
However, as we looked into classrooms, searched the Web, and spoke with classroom teachers, we learned that most infographie assignments resulted in what we would label as posters. Essentially, these products were the equivalent of David Loertscher's "bird reports"- representations of loosely related facts and numbers, sometimes verified and paraphrased, displayed visually. We hypothesized that the student engagement enthusiastically reported by teachers came primarily from using novel technology, not from inquiry learning. If we were to devote time to teaching infographics, the product must be more than an attractive visual...