This is a longer piece (about an 8-minute read). I offer it slowly, and in the spirit of ethical literacy. It is meant for teachers who are holding the weight of a charged media moment and wondering how to make space for students to study rhetoric without turning human lives into classroom debates. The post that follows shares one way to frame this work through careful looking, media analysis, and poetic response.
Teaching a Charged Rhetorical Moment with Care: Reading Images Before They Become Arguments
We often tell students that literacy is power. That reading the word and the world equips us to participate, to speak back, to resist. But there are moments when the world rushes into our classrooms so quickly, so emotionally, and so saturated with media that our usual instincts—to analyze, to contextualize, to debate—risk moving faster than our ethics.
Right now, many teachers are encountering images and narratives emerging from Minnesota through a charged rhetorical climate. Photographs are circulating rapidly. Headlines are multiplying. Commentary is intensifying. Students are seeing the same image framed in radically different ways across platforms—news outlets, social media feeds, opinion posts, memes, and political messaging.
As English language arts teachers, we cannot pretend this context does not exist. Nor should we. These are precisely the moments when rhetoric matters most.
But we also have a responsibility to consider how we bring these materials into classrooms.
Before we ask images to stand in for arguments, we might first ask students to encounter them as texts.
Before we analyze what a photograph is being used to prove, we might first ask what it shows.
Before we debate meaning, we might slow down long enough to notice how meaning is made.
This post offers one way to frame a lesson around this rhetorical moment—one that centers ethical media literacy, close observation, and compassion for the human beings whose likenesses are circulating, often without their consent.
An Ethical Stance: Slow the Moment Down
In periods of public crisis, images rarely remain images for long. They become symbols. Evidence. Ammunition. They are pulled into narratives that precede them. They are asked to carry claims that extend far beyond the frame.
Students feel this acceleration. Many come to class already aware of what an image is “supposed” to mean.
Our first instructional move can be to interrupt that velocity.
To say: before this image becomes a position, we are going to read it.
Not to debate it.
Not to defend it.
Not to deploy it.
To read it.
This is not about neutrality. It is about discipline of attention—the same discipline we ask of students when they encounter poems, testimonies, or historical documents. It is about acknowledging that behind every circulating image is a person whose body, context, and story are being rhetorically leveraged.
A Phased Approach to Teaching the Rhetorical Situation
Drawing on approaches often used to teach poetry and primary texts, this work can unfold in intentional stages.
1. First Encounter: Observation Without Interpretation
Begin with the image itself (or a description of it if you are not displaying it).
Ask students to write or talk only about what they can literally see or hear.
- What details are present?
- What is the setting?
- What do you notice about composition, angle, distance, color, framing?
Prohibit claims. Prohibit conclusions. Prohibit social media language.
The purpose is to help students experience how quickly interpretation usually rushes in—and what it feels like to hold it back.
2. Second Lens: Craft and Construction
Next, widen attention to rhetorical and multimodal choices.
- Who took this image?
- From what position?
- What might be outside the frame?
- How does cropping, focus, or timing shape what becomes visible?
Here, students begin to see the image as a constructed text rather than a transparent window.
3. Third Stage: Circulation and Rhetorical Use
After sustained observation do you introduce how the image is moving through media.
- Where is it appearing?
- With what captions?
- Alongside what language?
- In what genres (news, commentary, meme, illustration)?
This is where rhetoric enters fully—not as debate, but as study.
Call-Out for Students: How an Image Changes as It Circulates
One visible pattern in the current media moment involves the transformation of a single photograph over time.
Teachers might help students trace a sequence such as:
- The photograph: A documented moment involving a child wearing a distinctive hat.
- The illustrated or cartooned child: The image is redrawn, stylized, and made more easily shareable—shifting it from documentation toward symbolism.
- The isolated object: In some iterations, the child disappears entirely, leaving only the hat. The human subject is removed; the object becomes the sign.
- The historical overlay: Language and allusions are layered on—invocations of “First they came for…,” references to past regimes, or imagery associated with historical persecution.
Each transformation performs rhetorical work. Each step increases portability while often decreasing embodiment.
Students can be asked:
- What is gained rhetorically at each stage?
- What is lost?
- How does removing the body change the ethical stakes?
- How do historical references function in persuasion?
- What responsibilities accompany invoking collective memory?
This is not about agreeing with a message. It is about learning to see the mechanisms through which messages are built.
Writing as Processing, Not Performance
To keep this work from becoming positional or combative, writing should function first as sense-making rather than argument.
Possible invitations:
- A descriptive meditation on the image before commentary.
- A reflection on what changed as they saw different versions.
- A list of questions the image raises rather than claims it answers.
- A short piece written from the standpoint of ethical witnessing: what does it mean to look at someone whose image is circulating globally?
This kind of writing reinforces that literacy is not only about persuasion. It is also about attention, restraint, and care.
Adding Poetic Response: Holding Space Rather Than Taking Sides
After students have spent time observing, tracing circulation, and naming rhetorical moves, it can be powerful to give them space to respond not with arguments, but with poems.
In 90 Ways of Community, there are many structures that support this kind of work—ways that allow students to process, to wonder, and to stay with human complexity rather than collapse it into positions.
Structures such as:
- 20 Questions – students write a poem made only of questions the image and its circulation raise.
- An Exploration – students follow one small detail from the image across versions, platforms, or emotions.
- A Poem from the News – students craft found, refracted, or lyrical responses that transform headlines into reflective text.
Poetry here becomes not performance, but ethical processing.
It offers students a way to:
- sit with what they notice,
- register emotional and intellectual dissonance,
- ask new questions,
- and resist the demand to immediately declare a stance.
When humanity is at stake, there is often very little to “argue.” There are people to witness. There are lives being impacted.
There are bodies and stories being leveraged rhetorically—sometimes with consent, sometimes without.
Poetic response allows students to remain with that reality.
To hold space for the fact that real humans are both experiencing harm and being turned into symbols.
Widening the Lens: Media Structures and Historical Patterns
After this grounding—in observation, rhetorical study, and poetic response—many classrooms choose to widen the lens.
Here, students can begin to examine how symbolic reduction, scapegoating, and the extraction of human images from human context appear across history. They can study how media structures participate in these processes. They can explore how familiar rhetorical patterns escalate in moments of social fear, often in ways scholars of genocide and mass violence have long documented: the movement from people, to types, to symbols.
This does not require students to adjudicate contemporary policy. It asks them to understand literacy itself as a protective practice—one that helps people recognize when and how human beings are turned into rhetorical instruments.
Why This Belongs in English Language Arts
This is close reading.
This is rhetorical analysis.
This is multimodal literacy.
This is historical allusion.
This is ethics of representation.
But it is also something more foundational.
It is teaching students that how we read matters—especially when lives are entangled with the texts before us.
In moments like this, ELA classrooms can become places where students learn not only how arguments are made, but how to pause before making them. Where they practice seeing human beings before symbols. Where they study rhetoric not to sharpen sides, but to understand forces.
Before we ask images to carry the weight of the world, we can teach students how to meet them first—with clarity, with discipline, with poetry, and with care.
Thank you for this important work, Sarah. Lots to think about as we move forward.