Visual literacy in education

Visual literacy in education develops a student's visual literacy – their ability to comprehend, make meaning of, and communicate through visual means, usually in the form of images or multimedia.

Images have always been involved in learning with pictures and artwork to help define history or literary works. There is also a long tradition of using texts as educational images that reaches back to the Enlightenment. However, visual literacy in education is becoming a much broader and extensive body of learning and comprehension. This is due to the integration of images and visual presentations in the curriculum as technology and the increasing availability of computers.

Traditionally, in education in particular, the conventional approach was that young learners acquired conventions of print which made each student a discursive learner. As we have recognized that there are multiple learning styles which better suit some students, some are text oriented, others are visual, kinesthetic, auditory, or a combination of two or more, developers of educational materials have adapted and made use of new media and technology. In 1989, there was a call for new curriculum in social studies, which was uniquely suited to bringing visual information to educational programs by introducing map reading skills, charts and graphs for analyzing data, primary source visuals from the period ephemera, and paintings, sculpture, architecture, objects of daily use, and other evidence of material culture that is the archive from which historians draw their information about past and present cultures. Materials that were embraced for their visual energy, authenticity, and characteristic interest to engage students were prepared by a research and development group named Ligature, whose design director, Josef Godlewski (July 3, 1948 – April 8, 2013), a teacher of graphic design at The Rhode Island School of Design, brought to what is now the accepted integration of visuals with text that we see in print and media board learning programs.

Multimedia advancements have redefined what it means to teach literacy in the classroom. Today, students must be able to present and decode written and visual images, presenting educators with the task of teaching visual literacy in the classroom. Students today are using PowerPoint, PhotoStory, MovieMaker and other tools to create presentations in the classroom. This presents a challenge to educators as they seek to empower their students with the necessary tools to thrive in a media driven environment.

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Wikipedia