Employing visual literacy techniques

Visual Literacy and Visual Culture

Familiarity with specific images or sets of images plays a role in a culture's visual heritage. Two questions can be asked about this type of visual literacy: Is this a type of knowledge that is worth building into the formal educational curriculum of our schools? What are the educational implications of visual literacy? There is a three-part educational rationale to these questions. First, kno...

Film: Visual Literacy

People who write about movies have traditionally referred to the conventions of cinematic representation—such things as low-angle shots, fade-outs, or flashbacks—as the “language” of film. Does the ability to understand this language require previous experience? Or, to put this question differently, would a “naive” viewer, someone who had never seen a movie before, be able to make any sense of ...

Conceptual Problems Of Visual Literacy

1 Perspective Of Visual Literacy

An alternative to the common approach to defining concepts is introduced, where the primary goal is to point to what is large and essential in a concept, that is, to its perspective. Based on this new approach, visual literacy is defined as the ability to decode and design implicit information. It is argued that such literacy is no less needed than the common literacy, which is the ability to r...

The Visual Literacy White Paper

Visual communication is a process of sending and receiving messages using images. Visual literacy can be defined as the “ability to construct meaning from visual images” (Giorgis, Johnson, Bonomo, Colbert, & al, 1999: 146). To make meaning from images, the ‘reader’ uses the critical skills of exploration, critique and reflection. Lapp et al (1999) use the term “intermediality” to describe the c...