Beyond the Literal: Teaching Visual Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom (original) (raw)
Related papers
Use of Images to Support Critical Visual Literacy
Scottish Educational Review
In a contemporary society dominated by visual media, critical visual literacy (cvl) is a significant skill to inculcate, and yet, in some educational systems, its integration in teaching and education has not (yet) achieved enough recognition, especially in a context like Pakistan. As it is assumed that students will develop the necessary competencies by themselves as they operate in a far more visually stimulating world today. This view, however, is contested in literature where it is claimed that students can learn to develop cvl competencies just like they develop their phonemic literacy skills. Thus, the current study investigated how the use of images in a classroom of 12-year-olds in Karachi, Pakistan can help them develop cvl. Using an action research methodology with video-recorded observations, focus-group interviews, teacher’s reflections, and students’ work, data was obtained over 10 weeks. The findings from the study suggested that as students analysed and interpreted im...
Visual Literacy as a Classroom Approach
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.
Visual Literacy for the 21ST Century
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.
Literacy and the visual: Broadening our vision
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.
From visual literacy to critical visual literacy: An
2011
This article discusses differences in purpose, orientation and method between what is commonly known as "visual literacy" and what is being called "critical visual literacy". It does so through a comparative critical analysis of two sets of materials produced for classroom use: those produced in 1993 under the umbrella of visual literacy and those produced in 2011 under the umbrella of critical visual literacy. Through an examination of different approaches to context, semiotic choice and authorial discourse in the development of the material, the article shows the distinctive nature of critical visual literacy -its emphasis on the positioned and positioning nature of visual texts, on the socio-political consequences of semiotic choice in visual texts, and on reading against rather than reading with the visual text.
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.