Updated: April 22, 2016
Students
1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.
4. On Friday mornings, we will reveal at the bottom of this post more information about the photo. How does reading the caption and learning its back story help you see the image differently?
More?
- See all images in this series.
- Learn how other teachers use it.
- Read our introductory post.
- Find out about the philosophy, curriculum and professional development opportunities offered by Visual Thinking Strategies.
Updated: April 22, 2016
This week’s image comes from the April 8, 2016 “Week in Pictures” slide show on the Lens blog. The original caption reads:
Fatima and Mishal, 1, their father, Nisar Ghani, and their mother, Leena, waited at the King Abdulaziz Medical City in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for an operation to separate the girls, who were joined at the abdomen. The Saudis have a long-running program to separate conjoined twins from around the world.
Ben Hubbard reports on this program in the article “Conjoined Twins, a Trip to Saudi Arabia and a Risky Operation.” He writes:
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The doctor told the parents to say goodbye. With wet eyes, they held out their palms in prayer and bent over the hospital bed to kiss their daughters’ tiny foreheads.
The girls had spent the year since their birth facing each other like mirror images they could not escape. Identical twins joined at the belly, each had two arms and two legs, individual hearts and digestive tracts, but they shared a liver. Blood pumping through one also flowed through the other.
They could stand with their mother’s help, sometimes posing cheek-to-cheek, other times draping their arms around each other’s neck as if slow dancing. Now, shortly after their first birthday, they had traveled from their poor town in Pakistan to oil-rich Saudi Arabia for a rare and risky separation surgery that would radically change their lives.
“I still have doubts, and I am scared,” said their father, Nisar Ghani, 45, as the doctors wheeled the girls, Fatima and Mishal, toward the operating room. “In the end, it is all up to God.”
The operation, on March 26, was part of a long-running Saudi program to separate conjoined twins who come from poor families around the world. Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah, the surgeon who leads the program, said that since 1990 it had performed 40 procedures for families from 20 countries — on three continents — who could not otherwise afford the costly operations. That included 34 separations like Fatima and Mishal’s; two “sacrifice” operations, as Dr. Rabeeah described them, in which an ailing twin was removed so the other could live; and four that excised extra body parts from individual children.
You can see additional photos in this slide show.
Sergey Ponomarev is the photographer.