Since there are no topics that address Visual Literacy I thought it was overdue. So how do you define these literacies and what goals should we set at each level of development to educate students on the consumption and production of images?
How can we help develop/ instill a critical approach to visual culture where students thoughtfully question the motivations and sites of production of the imagery they encounter on a daily basis?
Looking at the recent release of National Core Arts Standards (in the US) http://www.nationalartsstandards.org/ does it do enough to address visual and media literacies? What competencies or components might you add?
Should the teaching of such literacies be restricted to the arts? What other subjects areas do you see these literacies playing an important role in?
In the English National Curriculum for English Language and Media Studies at both GCSE and A Level there are requirements for students to consider the messages in visual imagery. See the attached website for one exam board (there are others) http://www.aqa.org.uk Younger students in the UK are expected, as part of their English Language course, to develop an understanding and appreciation of how images can be constructed to convey messages and to analyse them. As a starting point students are asked to look at an image and describe what they see, to try to stay with only what is in the picture and refer to specific aspects. They are then encouraged to think about what emotions/feelings the image evokes in them. They may then consider an image in a range of contexts - appeal for donations, attached to a newspaper story, illustration in a story, illustration in a non-fiction text. They would produce their own text with images for a specific purpose. In moving image the sequencing of shots, and angles would also be explored. There has been lots of interesting work done.
In some way, that was the research that Aby Warburg were doing as soon as the begining of XX century, through his "Memosyne" Project.
Definition:
Visual literacy means the learned skill (or acquired set of skills) of interpreting visual messages accurately and of producing such messages oneself.
Teaching strategies:
Visual literacy is a genuinely human capacity: While a large percentage of mankind is still illiterate with regard to textual literacy, it is quite difficult to imagine humans being visually illiterate. With other words: Teaching visual literacy can more easily be based on capacities and competencies that students already bring with them. Jorge (see above) was right in pointing to Aby Warburg's work, but the works of Erwin Panofsky, Max Imdahl, and Ralf Bohnsack help to complete the "picture."
As a nurse researcher, I have a practical interest in this topic. In the US, there is a growing body of literature that suggests that healthcare literacy is strongly connected to good healthcare outcomes. Many people absorb their understanding of what to expect based on TV and other media portrayals which are highly inaccurate.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies, published a seminal assessment (Health literacy; A prescription to end confusion) of where we were in 2004. There is an urgent need to be to address the disconnect between current measures of healthcare literacy, which depend entirely on written literacy and do not capture other ways that people acquire information and how they process it. Vital to healthcare literacy is also numeracy.
From a theoretical perspective you can do no better than to consult Umberto Eco (1976). A theory of semiotics.
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