Jacob Lawrence’s “The Ordeal of Alice”

During her presentation at “The Civil Rights Movement in Northeast Georgia” professional development workshop, Marie Cochran introduced the participants to ways to incorporate visual images into their classrooms. She had them read Dianna Minor’s NCTE post, “Visual Literacy is Critical for 21st Century Learners,” and had them look at two images using the OPTIC strategy. Today, I want to look at one of the images that Cochran shared with participants and walk through the OPTIC strategy, detailing some how I would include the image and the strategy in one of my courses, specifically in my Lillian E. Smith Studies course. I had not seen this painting before Marie shared it with me as we prepared for the professional development program, so I was unfamiliar with it and the context in which it was created.

O-Overview

For overview, students must provide a general, probably one to two sentence statement, describing the image. My description of the image above would be, “The painting shows the interiority and the psychological damage an individual, the young girl in this case, endures when attacked from multiple angles and perspectives.” I say this because we see the central image of what appears to a young, Black girl holding school books and pierced with arrows as grotesque caricatures surround her from every angle on the frame.