MESHGuides

The scope of visual literacy in education now extends beyond illustrative content, symbols, diagrams and charts to encompass drawing and painting, moving images, animations and multimodal media.

Studying the  history of visual learning provides some fundamental background knowledge and understanding that is relevant to, and has a practical application in today's schools and learning environments.

Images and visual cues have always been used to support learning. These date back to the earliest days of mankind. Visual learning has always been closely linked to technology, whether that be images made on prehistoric walls or those created using the latest digital technologies.

Visual literacy is an essential ‘literacy’ for teachers, and one they should be actively exploring and encouraging and helping  their learners develop. Digital platforms, tools and environments have become ubiquitous  and it can be argued that visual literacy is very closely linked to digital literacy. These inextricable links between the digital and the visual, affect education as much as any other aspect of our lives.

Visually literate teachers and learners understand that:

• images are made with a specific purpose

• images can convey meaning and information more concisely and powerfully than text

• there are instances when text may be a more appropriate medium to convey information

• that images have a cultural and collective meaning

• images can be misinterpreted

Visually literate learners will;

• be able to critically discriminate between the visual information that is presented to them
• will be able to visualise abstract concepts
• have far greater opportunities to be producers as well as consumers, they will be able to participate in and exploit authentic learning opportunities.

Visually literate teachers will;

Visual literacy is analogous to the traditional literacy of reading and writing, with grammar syntax and tone and meaning (See Figure 1). Traditional forms of literacy include reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and Sinatra (1986) suggested expanding the model to include viewing (observing and experiencing), visual representation, and digital, media technology (See Figure 3).

In order to understand how we decode the visual data to interpret meaning we can deconstruct visual literacy into the categories below. Nearly all visual resources will fall into one or more of these. Being familiar with these will offer teachers a solid foundation with which to design learning opportunities.

To help learners become visually literate, it is a good idea to set design learning activities that help them gain a practical understanding of visual grammar and syntax, and identify these elements and the part they play in visual media.

Visual literacy is an essential element for organising managing and sharing ideas - it develops critical thinking and is appropriate for all areas of learning - teachers should design learning activities that:

The ISTE Visual Literacy toolbox asks the following question:

“What do you want your learners to be able to do? What do you want your learners to focus on? What are you hoping they can get out of using images?

and suggests the following activities (paraphrased and divided into two categories). These concepts provide skills that enable learners to read images with greater understanding!

Visual Interpretation (‘reading’ visual artefacts)