Visual Literacy in Education - Teaching Visual Literacy

Teaching Visual Literacy

Teaching visual literacy in the classroom means many things from film, dance, and mime through the use of diagrams, maps and graphs to children's picture books. Visual texts can be found in books, the internet, environmental signage, TV, tablet devices and touch-screen machines like ATMs. It includes teaching students to critically analyze the images presented to them through advertising and other media. It also entails equipping students with the tools to create presentations that effectively communicate content. Today teachers are using classroom blogs and wikis to keep their students up to date with class requirements and to encourage collaborative class discussions. More and more students are relying on technology to enhance their learning environments. As technology continues to advance, their availability and capability will create more tools for teachers to utilize.

An attempt to observe children reading and writing visual texts was made by twenty US and Australian teachers in 1990-94, and followed up in 2011. The results were published in Steve Moline, I See What You Mean; Visual literacy K-8 (Stenhouse, 1995, rev. ed. 2011). The visual texts studied were limited to those used in information books, e-books, and websites, such as diagrams, maps, storyboards, flowcharts, time lines, webs, trees and tables. Moline claims that the strategy he calls recomposing assists in essay planning and comprehension. Recomposing is described as reading information in a lexical format (such as a paragraph of sentences) and summarizing it in a visual format (such as a flowchart or table). The visual text then forms the framework for the child when writing her/his essay on the topic.