Summarizing it the infographic way: Part 2

By Irfan Rifai

This semester, I asked a group of students sitting for my Leadership class to make a summary of a chapter from Gary Yuk’l Leadership and Organization book. The chapter was on Power and influence. Students were confused at the beginning , but as they tried and had the experience, many of them ended up submitting fabulous work.  The following graphic summarizes how I did it in my class.

In English  classes, what are the advantages of using info – graphic  for summarizing purposes? To answer the question, we should first answer  a more fundamental question: what is our purpose of giving a summarizing task? There are types of summaries that instructors usually have, namely, Indicative, Informative, and Evaluative. In indicative summary, students are expected to make a record of only the essential topics from some particular  texts. An instructor, in this case, should expect a compilation of points instead of details of arguments or supporting facts.  Here is an example of an indicative summary produced in an info-graphic.

The second type of a summary task is informative. In this kind of task, students are expected to present both qualitative and quantitative data of the original text.  Therefore, an instructor may expect students to give a full restatement  of the original text. Can this type of summary be done through graphic? It may not be as detail as it is done in the conventional summary. The last type of summary task is evaluative summary. It is the kind of summary that requires students to approach the critical review task and makes it possible for them to find other sources of texts to compare. As challenging as it may sound to condense pages of information into graphic, it can actually be done. Have a look at the following works that are more informative than the previous one.

In my experience of using infographic as means to make summary in my class, I found that students were more motivated to do  the task. They felt that they were more challenged in getting the main idea into a form, or variation that they have the control with. By using this, at certain stage, students have made their learning personal. The other benefit that I can deduce  out of this activity is students are getting at least two  skills being exercised: the linguistic and  the technical skills.  Well, I hope that is the case.