When Selecting Visual Materials to Use for a Project, What Are the Best Questions to Ask Yourself?
VISUAL LITERACY IS KING OF THE Data ERA
For many people, mention the word 'literacy' and an prototype of a library filled with dusty books is conjured upwardly. This is not surprising given the importance the written word has played in all our lives, especially those of us who are too old to exist considered 'digital natives'.
Despite the primacy of the written give-and-take in our schools, it is non the only ways of widely sharing our thoughts and ideas. In this age of the internet especially, nosotros are constantly bombarded with images – both static and moving. It is more essential than ever that our students develop the necessary visual literacy skills to navigate this paradigm-intense world we all inhabit.
Screens of all shapes and sizes dominate our attention span, YouTube, and various social media platforms take replaced the book as the primary source of entertainment in the blink of an center, and this is unlikely to change.
In this article, we volition expect at some approaches to assist you come up upwardly with activities to use visual texts and teach visual literacy in the classroom. We will also suggest some fun and meaningful activities you can use with your students today.
Firstly, however, we need to become to grips with exactly what nosotros hateful when nosotros apply the term 'visual literacy'. Every bit a general working definition, we can think of the term as referring to interpreting and creating visual images. As with other types of literacy, visual literacy is about communication and interaction and while it has much in common with those other forms of literacy, information technology has some unique aspects of its own that students will need to explore specifically.
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WHAT IS A VISUAL TEXT?
The bones definition of visual literacy is the ability to read, write and create visual images. Both static and moving. Information technology is a concept that relates to art and design but information technology too has much wider applications. Visual literacy is well-nigh language, communication and interaction. Visual media is a linguistic tool with which we communicate, exchange ideas and navigate our highly visual digital globe.
The term was first coined in 1969 by John Debes, who was the founder of the International Visual Literacy Association:
Why is Visual Literacy Of import?
Much of the data that comes to our students is a combination of both written text and images. It is essential that our students are fully equipped to process that information in all its forms.
Considering how visually orientated we are as humans, it is no surprise that images have such a powerful touch on on united states. Research shows that there is a broad range of benefits derived from improved visual literacy including:
Visual Data is More than Memorable
I of the most effective ways to encourage information to make that important jump from the express short-term memory to the more powerful long-term retentivity is to pair text with images. Studies show that nosotros retain approximately x-20% of written or spoken information, merely around 65% of the data when it is presented visually.
Visual Information is Transferred Faster
Information presented visually is processed extremely apace by the brain. The brain is even existence able to see images that announced for a mere 13 milliseconds. Around 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual in nature.
Helps Students Communicate with the Globe Around Them
Traditionally, we think of teaching literacy as the two mode street of reading and writing. We can call back of visual literacy as involving the like processes of interpreting images and creating images. In a fast-moving globe, with an ever-increasing diagnosis of attention arrears disorders, we increasingly rely on images to quickly convey meaning.
Enriches Agreement
While images tin be used in isolation, they often accompany text or sound. Images can greatly enrich the students' agreement of a text or other media, but to exist able to collaborate with these deeper levels of pregnant, students must possess the necessary skills to access those depths.
Increases Enjoyment
Not simply does increased visual literacy enrich the understanding of our students of the media they consume, but it tin likewise enrich their enjoyment likewise – specially of visual art. If you have taken younger students to an fine art gallery you lot may have heard protests of 'This is deadening!'
Even so, when students have a deeper understanding of the 'significant' backside the fine art pieces, or are familiar with the context around the art, insights into the lives of the artists, or experienced with some of the techniques that produced the pieces, students often derive greater pleasure from their visit.
The same is true of their engagement in terms of visual literacy. Every bit informed readers of images in a range of modalities, students are opened upward to an exciting dimension of shape, color and texture and more.
Creates More Educated Epitome Readers
In an era of simulated news and ceaseless advertizing, a responsible arroyo to the duty of educating our students must involve encouraging them to become informed viewers of the world effectually them, including the media they engage with. Through the teaching of visual literacy we can aid students understand the dissimilar means the images they eat can be used to dispense their emotions and persuade them to act in a given manner.
Supports EAL Learners
The use of images in the classroom can be of great benefit to students who come from non-English language-speaking backgrounds. As these students travel on their road to fluency in English, images can provide an constructive span in that learning procedure. While the use of images in the forms of flashcards, writing frames etc for the purposes of education EAL learners may exist obvious, the creation of images by the students themselves tin can also exist a smashing way to assess their understanding of more abstract concepts and vocabulary.
What Forms of Visual Text Are Used in the Classroom?
Students are exposed to a vast array of visual media. When we hear the jazzy term 'visual text' nosotros may immediately think of its expression in the digital age, but the roots of visual texts stretch deep into our history; all the way back to our ancestry. Remember of the cave paintings in Lascaux!
Still, today there are then many more forms of visual text to consider. From cave walls to computer screens and all points in between, students are exposed to billboards, photographs, TV, video, maps, memes, digital stories, video games, timelines, signs, political cartoons, posters, flyers, newspapers, magazines, Facebook, Instagram, movies, DVDs, and cell phones wallpaper – to name but twenty! All these tin serve as the jumping-off point for a lesson on visual literacy.
The digital age has opened the floodgate on images spilling into our consciousness and unconsciousness alike. The implications for visual literacy stretches far across the limits of the English classroom into all areas of our lives. From the math student interpreting graphs to the music student following musical notation, or the geography student poring over Google Earth. For a multitude of purposes, in an array of modalities, visual literacy is ever more of import.
Visual Literacy Clues: What Are They and How Do We Read Them?
"Visual Literacy is the ability to construct meaning from images. It'due south not a skill. It uses skills as a toolbox. It's a grade of critical thinking that enhances your intellectual capacity."
Brian Kennedy
Manager, Toledo Museum of Art
If visual literacy is almost decoding pregnant from images of various kinds, we need to teach our students how to set about this intimidating job – only as we do when we teach them how to approach a written text. Regardless of the nature of the image, this process follows iii general steps:
1. What Can Yous Run into?
To answer this, students must go familiar with Visual Literacy Clues (VLCs). When students are familiar with these clues they will have a method of approaching any image with a view to decoding its significant. The VLCs are: bailiwick matter, colors, angles, symbols vectors, lighting, gaze, gestures, and shapes. These categories provide an approach to examine the details of the various aspects of the image they are reading.
2. How Does It Make You Feel?
After the students have had time to note what they can see in the image through examination of the VLCs, it is at present fourth dimension for them to consider their emotional response to what they have viewed.
With close reference to the VLCs they have previously identified, students express how the epitome makes them feel and how it has influenced them to experience this way. They may feel anger, anguish, excitement, happy etc. There is no limit to the emotions they may refer to, provided they can point to evidence from the image. Hither are some suggested questions to assist the students explore their responses:
Subject Matter: What is the topic of the movie? Who and what are in the paradigm? What is the image about?
Colour: How is color used in the paradigm? What upshot practise the colors chosen have on the viewer?
Angles: Are we looking from above or below? What is the camera angle? How does this affect what we see and how we feel about it?
Symbols: What symbols are used in this epitome? What do you recollect they stand for? Are the colors that were chosen symbolic?
Vectors: Can you come across the major lines in the prototype? Are they broken or unbroken? How exercise the lines create reading paths for our eyes?
Lighting: Can yous describe the lighting used in the pic. How does it affect the 'mood' of the picture show?
Gaze: What type of look is the character giving? Where is their gaze directed? What does this say?
Gesture: What blazon of gestures is the character giving? What is communicated by these gestures?
Shapes: What geometric shapes can you recognize in the image? Exercise they echo? Is there a pattern? Is society or chaos conveyed?
iii. What Is The Epitome Trying To Tell Usa?
This tertiary aspect peels back another level of meaning to become to the overall message underlying the image. This question asks the students to delve into the intentions of the paradigm-maker themselves. The genre of the image will be of significance hither also, as the educatee considers the nature of the image as art, entertainment, advertizing or a fusion of the diverse genres.
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Activities for the Educational activity of Visual Literacy in the Classroom
1. Explanation a Photograph
Photographs are one of the well-nigh familiar forms of visual media for our students. Ofttimes photographs they see will exist accompanied by captions.
In this practise, requite out copies of a single photograph to the class without captions. Their task here is to closely examine the photo, either individually or in pocket-size groups, before writing a caption to accompany the photograph. When students accept completed their captions they can compare their captions with each other earlier you reveal the true nature of the photograph.
Prior to writing their explanation, you may wish to provide some supporting questions or groundwork information. Yous may, withal, wish them to become in blind to whatever background other than what they can deduce from the photograph itself.
The purpose of this activity is to reveal to the students how open to estimation a single visual image can be. The students will proceeds awareness of the power of a caption to frame an image's significant, even if the caption is not accurate.
Some suggested questions for students to consider:
- What people, objects, or activities tin you see in the picture?
- Are there any clues to when information technology was taken? What was happening at this fourth dimension in history?
- Are there whatever clues to where it was taken? Are there whatsoever clues to why it was taken or who took it?
- Is it a posed photograph? A natural scene? A documentary photograph? A selfie?
Extension: You may wish to use this activeness every bit a lead-in to a bigger topic, equally information technology tin make for a great introduction to draw out the students' background knowledge and atomic number 82 into a larger discussion or inquiry projection. This activeness can also exist easily adapted for a wide range of different types of images, for example, advertisements.
2. Appoint with a Video Game
There is no doubt of two things when it comes to video games:
1. They get a bad rap
2. They are extremely popular amid younger people
And while there is no doubtfulness that there are some games on the marketplace of dubious worth, equally with any art form, at that place is much of merit and potential in this relatively new medium.
While there are obvious links that can be made with storytelling activities by examining the narrative of many video games, it may be much more interesting, and useful, to expect more closely at how video games 'piece of work' in terms of the overall experience.
Video games are immersive, multi-sensory experiences for players. This is a large part of their entreatment. While written texts can appeal largely to our imaginative faculties, video games can likewise appeal to our senses of sight and hearing – and now, fifty-fifty touch can be incorporated. To have students focus on visual aspects of their gaming feel, give them a worksheet to make notes on that feel using the VLC categories listed in a higher place. This can make for a smashing grouping discussion activity as the movie or game plays with the audio off.
3. Multi-Modal Comparisons
We are long familiar with the concept of movie tie-ins. In days gone past the response to the question "Take you read x?" was often a "No, but I saw the movie." Nowadays the answer is just as probable to exist "No, but I have the video game." The triumvirate of the volume – movie – game tie-in is fertile ground for some interesting text comparing piece of work in the classroom.
Popular necktie-in triplets include Harry Potter and the seminal Lord of the Rings. Bring your students' powers of visual perception to this multimedia experience by selecting scenes from the original volume and making a comparison with how the scene is handled in the motion-picture show or video game.
Keep the focus on the visual elements in the latter 2 media. Encourage students to discuss, write, or set a presentation on how the movie or video game translates non-visual elements from the text version into visual elements. Again, reference to the VLCs as discussed above will be an important element in this activity.
4. The Timeline
While the activities looked at so far have been about honing the students' comprehension skills in relation to visual texts, this activeness allows students an opportunity to apply that knowledge to the cosmos of visual texts themselves.
Encourage the students to plot significant milestones in the course of their life on a visual timeline. They may apply a combination of images and text if this is more in line with your learning objectives and students' abilities. However, exercise ensure you remind students of how they can incorporate the VLCs into how they convey pregnant in their images.
This can also exist a useful activity to incorporate various aspects of IT skills. Students tin perform advanced Google epitome searches to locate copyright-gratuitous images or utilise websites like The Noun Projection to locate Creative Commons icons to assistance them make a slideshow version of their timeline on Powerpoint. In that location are a wealth of software applications that tin assist, many freely available online.
Draw a Line Under It
In this commodity we take touched the mere tip of that proverbial iceberg. The scope for using visual texts in the classroom is potentially express but by our own imagination. While we take looked at several concrete examples of visual literacy-based activities in the examples above, the opportunity for edifice lessons effectually the myriad forms of visual texts is endless.
Whether utilising advertisements, internet memes, or archetype works of art as the focus, beginning with the three broad questions outlined previously: What tin y'all encounter? How does information technology make y'all feel? What is the epitome trying to tell us? These questions provide the ground for developing your learning objectives and your activities can easily be built around them.
The Visual Literacy Clues provide the strategies with which the students can read any visual texts whether in the form of moving or withal images. The more do students go using these strategies the more fluent their reading volition go. And while for some students these skills may take fourth dimension to develop, remind them too that but equally we can refer to images as visual texts, we can equally refer to written text as images themselves as the letters on the page are themselves symbolic in nature.
If they tin can learn to read the complexities of the written language they tin can be confident they will exist able to larn to read the visual globe too.
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