Visual Literacy and Its Impact on Teaching and Learning

2014

Visually literate persons are able to understand, to create and to use images as a means of expression and communication. Understanding the elements, the meanings, and the natures of visual images may lead visually literate persons to be able to use the images for the purpose of teaching English. Integrating the visual images in the steps of teaching learning process may create better learning atmosphere that trigger the students' higher achievement. This paper is aimed to elaborate the nature of visual literacy and the integration of visual literacy component in teaching English.

This book is an edited volume, with contributions by Barbara Stafford, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jon Simons, Jonathan Crary, and others. It was the product of a combined conference and exhibition of the same name, which has generated another book, "Visual Practices Across the University" (which is uploaded, in its entirety, on this site) and "Visual Cultures" (not yet published). "Visual Literacy" is intended to survey the meanings of the expression, and related notions such as visual competence. Some contributors are interested in the theory of literacy when it pertains to the visual; others in its rhetoric; and others in its implementation at college and secondary school level. The book is intended to serve as a resource for conversations about what comprises minimal or desirable visual ability, competence, or literacy in a university or secondary-school setting. This text is the introduction, the only part of the book I wrote--and so the only part I will upload here.

The inclusion of visual images in current educational literacy discussions tends to contextualise them within more semiotic, socio-critical and textually focussed theoretical traditions. These particular traditions privilege and emphasise the structures and "language-like" aspects of visual images, and include the broader social and cultural structural frames, such as gender and class, as well as the specific codes and "grammars" of individual images. While there are strong benefits in employing these approaches, the nature of visual images themselves may require a broader, interdisciplinary approach. This paper will include discussion of the field of visual culture in general, the unique nature of images, the role of philosophy in regard to image, the inclusion of the individual's hermeneutic role in meaning-making, and the attendant educational implications when applying such work to contemporary educational literacy practice.

RFI Publication, 2021

Learning has always been a fundamental characteristic of human species. Human civilization has evolved and touched the heights of great advancement while learning about the occurrences in his environment. The desire to communicate his learnt lessons has been one of the prominent reasons of the origin of the languages. From cave paintings to early scripts, we can see that the human mind had a strong inclination to learn through the medium of visuals. With changing times and better tools, man has equipped himself to communicate at all levels in an engrossing manner by incorporating the visuals so to enhance the message and to bridge the semantic gaps. Thus this paper is an attempt where the authors would try to bring out the role of visuals in the pursuit of learning. This paper would also try to highlight the novel visual techniques which are blended in the teaching strategies so as to improvise upon the learning barriers and further add more value to the literary analysis and comprehension.

I n our society, which is full of images, visual representations and visual experiences of all kinds, there is a paradoxically significant degree of visual illiteracy. Despite the importance of developing specific visual skills, visual literacy is not a priority in school curriculum (Spalter & van Dam, 2008). This work aims at (1) emphasising the importance of integrating visual literacy as the fifth linguistic skill in English classes, and (2) showing a visual activity exploring a video called Price Tag. We will show some strategies that can be applied in foreign language classes in order to teach students a way to encode and decode the artifacts of their own culture and perceive the affordances of multimodal composition. In this research, the students' cell phones were used with which we developed activities using videos as multimodal texts.

inter-disciplinary.net

IJAEDU- International E-Journal of Advances in Education

The dominance of the pictorial world forms the beginning of the effect of new visual civilisation in the 21st century. Today, we already know that photograph, film and television are just fist stage of visual era. The modern phenomena of digitalisation and mass communication related to the development of information and communication technologies and Internet, dramatically saturate the pictures and pictorial messages to public space and thus also to our everyday life. Posters, billboards and various visual posts attack us every day with their pictorial messages, trying to influence us while going to the work or school as well as while being on the road for a joy or relax. The presence of visual impulses is perceived also in the public space, for example in shopping malls. In such an environment, their role is to affect our purchasing habits. The information lettering in pictorial form-iconograms-orientate us on the streets, at the stations of mass transport, at the airports, in shopping malls, in tourism regions. Today, Internet and social networks are mainly the source of information mediated in the form of pictures in multimedia form. In the contemporary world, heavily saturated with pictures and media, our view of what literacy means must be extended, or even redefined. To read pictures is more than to read and write text, this is the "reading of the world of pictures". The Kaiser Family Foundation Study implies young people devote still greater attention to the pictures in the new media (Internet and social networks). While this was six hours and twenty-one minutes a day in average in 2009, it is seven hours and thirty-eight minutes a day in 2013. The numerical data say there has been a significant shift for 4 years and young people pay greater attention to pictorial information, they devote more of their time to them, by one hour and seventeen minutes. We may state that the use of new media has been intensified for recent 10 years, thus also time capacity devoted to media by young people has been increased too, save one exceptionthe interest in reading has decreased, yet it still consider it to be the basic, non-excludable literacy. Saying it in more unambiguously, text reading gets to the background and the first place is attained by reading, or perception of pictures in digital media. In the article we present a theoretical model of visual literacy and develop new personnel competencies of children for the 21st century, such as visual perception, visual thinking, visual language and learning visual literacy.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2012

I (Cheryl, second author) recently observed 2 ninth-grade general English classrooms in an urban high school in which I do research. Both were print rich-walls covered with posters, charts, and artwork that referenced literature texts, content knowledge, and curriculum standards. In both classrooms, similar content was covered, including literature texts such as Monster, Who Am I Without Him? and Day of Tears. Yet, upon closer inspection, the practices in each of the spaces were different; and these practices made a difference in the levels of engagement and student performance. Though each space was print rich, the visually rich environment in one classroom was a product of the students' literacies, including studentcreated CDs of musical narratives of Monster and Who Am I Without Him?; photos and drawings/paintings and artistic renderings of literature characters, themes, and settings; poetry and lyrics from songs of protest; and Facebook pages from characters of the novels. In the room, students moved fluidly across literacy stations and book clubs, worked individually to create artifacts, and had gallery walks of their peers' published works that prompted their own reflection, commentary, discussion, and writing. Observing and participating in this particular classroom, I realized that I could see these students' worlds, their thinking, and knowledge: The texts that the students produced and interacted with demonstrated a discerning use of color, shape, spatial representation, print, message and meaning/communication, and critical knowledge of canonical and popular culture. The teacher used her students' visual literacies to help drive instruction and ground knowledge. The "visual literacy" in this ninth-grade class was not restricted to traditional graphic organizers and webs. Using this as a model, how can educators purposefully tap into our students' visual literacies in the secondary school classroom? What Is Visual Literacy and Why Use It in the Classroom? Visual literacy refers to the ability to make meaning from information in the form of the image. The "reader" of this image has the competence or ability to interpret, evaluate, and represent the meaning in visual form. We live in a visual culture. Students' everyday lives ref lect the dominance of images on screen that are colorful, that have animation, texture, and dimensionality. The combined inf luences of the image have shifted the way students make

Refocusing the Vision, …, 2010