Critical analysis of 'Aladdin, Genie & the snake Jafar'

The drawing and the video together illustrate the functional level of my visual literacy (as a potent from of meaning making) and the effect culture and personal experience have on the production of meaning. Drawing did not occur just out of 'fun', but occurred as a conscious attempt to represent something I had seen or experienced. This theory backs up the argument that images are a form of language just as powerful as linguistic literacies.  When linked to the video we clearly see that the array of icons I chose to illustrate were part of a deliberate attempt to give meaning to my text (story). It is known that children from the ages of four to eight (approximately) are mostly interested in depicting a set of events through drawing - as opposed to older students who agonize over the realism of a singular representation (Eisner, 2001, p. 14). We can see this in my Aladdin drawing: the illustrations are highly didactic in their aim. i.e. icons such as the sword, fire, boy, snake and genie instructively depict the main elements I witnessed in the scene. No doubt I watched the movie a short time before drawing this particular picture in class. My words were not so instructive for I lacked the knowledge of the systems that revolved around writing. At that stage I simply had a vague phonological awareness of words . This awareness enabled me to decipher the first and last letters of words by the sounds that started and finished these words (Ritchey, 2007). An example here would be 'Aladdin'.. surely I could say his name (he was a hit with kids!) but when it came to spelling it i could only decipher that his name started with 'ah' and ended with 'nn'. So I formed 'aMMMn'. I'm struck by how far developed my drawing skills were in contrast to my writing. Notice the very deliberate selection of colours in conjunction with the size of each character. I wonder if I was preparing to enter what Eisner (2001, p. 14) refers to as the 'mimetic' stage of visual production: a stage where students become more concerned with creating pictures that share a physical likeness to what they represent. I doubt there's any coincidence that Genie is blue, Aladdin is small and the snake Jafar is big. 

As I alluded before the choice to draw this scene from the Aladdin movie was no coincidence. Drawing on background knowledge and prior experiences is a influencing element that informs the construction of meaning in texts - for children and adults alike. Freebody & Luke (cited in Santoro, 2004, p. 57) refer to this phenomenon as 'text participant'. It seems that Mrs Smith gave me two stamps for the Aladdin drawing (looking through the story book she generally only gave one stamp or a tick), so she must have observed some improvement in my story. I wonder if she consciously recognised the fact that my learning was improving due to the fact that I had the freedom to include my experiences in learning activities?