Week 6: Visual Literacy

This week we talked about visual literacy—the idea that using visual images (art, photography, etc.) can be used to help people better understand concepts.  We also touched on how powerful  visual literacy tools can be, as well as the importance of students understanding and recognizing the sometimes complex messages of photos. Two videos, both used in class, help show each of these ideas.

A popular Dove video, found on Youtube, illustrates how images (and people) can be manipulated.  The video shows how retouching and tools like Photoshop can be used to transform a person’s image. Another video on Youtube shows the importance visual literacy has on our everyday lives. Often times people associate the term visual literacy with using Photoshop and other tools that can manipulate and create cool images. However, visual literacy is as simple as looking at a photo in a newspaper or recognizing that a stop sign means stop.

One field where visual literacy is especially strong is in journalism. Nine times out of 10, when someone opens a newspaper they see the pictures first and then decide if they want to read the story. The power of a photo can be just as strong as or stronger than the story itself. In my newspaper design class, we’ve talked about the importance of photography to news. As far as appealing to readers goes, the photo is first and the text is last. People are visual. We like to see things, and that idea needs to translate to what journalists provide people with. A journalists job by definition is to inform people of the world around them. Visual literacy is a very important tool to ensuring we convey that effectively. Imagine a newspaper without photos?

Just as visual literacy is important to journalism, it’s equally important to education. In an ever-changing society, young students need to be able to understand and interpret things in different ways.  Visual-literacy.org is a great site for future educators and students to learn more about visual literacy. According to the Web site, it  teaches students to evaluate advantages and disadvantages of visual representations, to improve their shortcomings, to use them to create and communicate knowledge, or to devise new ways of representing insights. Check out the site to learn more about visual literacy in the classroom.