In a world full of visual information, are we truly making sense of it all?
In this post, I will be discussing the importance of visual literacy. Often, when we think of the term “literacy”, we think of the ability to read or write a text. What some fall short of understanding is the fact that images and other visuals are texts, we just read them in a different way. Now more than ever, visual literacy is just as valuable as “classic” literacy. The year is 2022, technology surrounds each and every one of us on a daily basis in its respective ways. There is now an entire generation of visual consumers, whether this means computers, smartphones, video games, kindles, televisions, or even online classwork. Some of us have even heard the upcoming phrase, “iPad kid”, referring to children who grew up after technology became mainstream and widely accessible. If you have ever seen a child playing a game or watching a show on an iPad or another smart device while their parents go about their busy work, you know exactly what I am talking about. Screen time becomes a part of these kids’ everyday lives as a means for both entertainment and education. We are exposed to images, videos, maps, and other visuals both on and off-screen every single day. The ability to dissect and make meaning of visuals becomes a part of critical thinking. Visual literacy has become so relevant as a twenty-first-century skill that it even falls into multiple of the literacy common core and NCTE standards. According to the NTCE,
“It is critical for students to be able to evaluate content/texts presented in diverse formats and media, a skill that can require much teacher modeling and independent practice. As students gain experience in interpreting works of art, infographics, film, videos, political cartoons, photographs, maps, advertisements, slide show presentations, and so on, they learn that they can use their imagination to see and think between and beyond the lines to draw inferences and conclusions. Visual literacy encourages student reflection, analysis, and evaluative thinking skills.” (NCTE, 2021)
This explains why the teaching of visual literacy is so important, but what does it mean to be visually literate? One working definition of visual literacy is as follows, “In a very general sense, visual literacy is construed as the ability of students to ‘use, interpret, analyze, and think critically about visual images and the significance of what they are seeing’” (Bamford, 2001, p. 1). To be visually literate, we must be able to think critically about the visuals we are exposed to on a higher level than simple consumption.
There are many ways to incorporate the teaching of visual literacy into the classroom. One technique of instruction is called the visual thinking strategy, or VTS for short. As a history education minor, this is a technique I have used many times in my history classes. According to the University of Birmingham, “Visual literacy is not just restricted to art history and film studies, it is important for everyone. Maps can show geographical information much better than a verbal or textual description. Charts and graphs can clearly describe the growth or decline of population, financial performance of a company, etc. Cartoons can sum up a viewpoint or opinion.” (LibGuides: Visual literacy: Why Visual Literacy is important, 2017) The teaching of history comes with a multitude of powerful images and graphs, such as forms of propaganda or statistics. As described in Todd Finley’s article, found here (https://www.edutopia.org/blog/ccia-10-visual-literacy-strategies-todd-finley), VTS encompasses an approach to dissecting visuals by asking leading questions about what students are seeing. One version of a visual thinking strategy is the spiral technique, which requires us to do exactly this. Students take in the visual components of an image, starting with basic questions such as “What do I see? What am I noticing?”, then proceeding to ask more in-depth questions such as “What could this represent? Why did the illustrator choose this as a way to convey their message?” These questions serve as building blocks of knowledge for students to analyze a piece of visual text.
Another method of teaching visual literacy, as discussed in Finley’s article, is the think-aloud strategy (one of my personal favorites). I have found this method to be particularly effective in my English content areas, especially when it comes to teaching graphic novels. Think-aloud strategies require students to pause during their reading and verbalize/write down their thoughts. These pauses slow down the reading process, which in turn provides us as readers with the opportunity to notice details we may have missed if we were to read at a quicker pace with no pauses. At each one of these pauses, the goal is to quite literally think out loud any connections, questions, predictions, or other thoughts that arise while we read. This helps us to create a better, more in-depth understanding of the text we are analyzing. In one of the lessons I taught this year, I used the think-aloud method as a during-reading strategy to guide my students through an African American spiritual. I provided a “toolbox” worksheet to help guide my students’ thinking, in case they needed that extra push. This worksheet included starter statements, such as, “I think…”, “I predict…”, “I wonder…”, “This reminded me of…” and other statements found useful for this specific strategy. The think-aloud strategy is great for breaking down any kind of reading, visual or not.
Visual literacy does not stop at images or animations, or even at the student. Visual literacy matters in our authentic day-to-day lives outside of a text. Teachers, for example, must become proficient in the visual literacy of their classrooms. Teachers are required to “read the room”, read their students’ body language, levels of participation, and take into consideration any external factors that may affect the overall “vibe” of the classroom. As teachers, it is our responsibility to make sure our classroom is a safe, welcoming environment for students to participate and learn in. It is also our duty to make sure our students are physically and mentally prepared to learn. If a student’s physical or emotional needs are not being met, it becomes that much harder for them to learn anything. This is why, as educators, it is so important to have the visual literacy skills of reading the room, proving we all have something to learn about visual literacy. In a world full of visual information, we must all learn how to make sense of it.
References
Bamford, A. (2001, July). The grammar of visual literacy within the world of interactive media. Paper presented at the Education Research Network Conference on Learning. Spetses, Greece.
Finley, T. (2014, February 19). Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies. Edutopia; George Lucas Educational Foundation. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/ccia-10-visual-literacy-strategies-todd-finley
LibGuides: Visual literacy: Why Visual Literacy is important. (2017). Bham.ac.uk. https://libguides.bham.ac.uk/asc/visualliteracy
NCTE. (2021, January 13). NCTE. NCTE. https://ncte.org/blog/2021/01/visual-literacy-critical-21st-century-learners/