Visual Literacy
Rooted in many disciplines, the visual literacy movement as we know it today sprang up because observant educators and scholars were puzzled by the changes they saw in young children after television arrived in the average U.S. home. The IQ scores of school-entering age children were rising sharply; but the number of students having difficulty learning to read and write were increasing" (Debes, 1994, viii). Since that recognition, visual literacy has been defined in numerous ways:
1975: "the ability both to understand and to express themselves in terms of visual material, to enable them to relate to visual images to meanings beyond the images themselves (Joan Platt quoted in Seels, 1994, p. 103).
1980: "to be visually literate is to be able to gain meaning from what we see and to be able to communicate meaning to others through the images we create" (Braden & Walker, quoted in Seels, 1994, p. 103).
"the ability to read and understand that which is seen and the ability to generate materials that have to be seen to be understood" (Wileman, quoted in Seels, 1994, p. 103).
1982: "visual literacy is the learned ability to interpret visual messages accurately and to create such messages" (Heinich, Molenda, & Russell, quoted in Seels, 1994, p. 104).
"visual literacy is the ability to understand and use images, including the ability to think, learn, and express oneself in terms of images" (Braden & Hortin, quoted in Seels, 1994, p. 104).
1987: "Visual literacy is the ability to understand the communications of a visual statement in any medium and the ability to express oneself with at least one visual discipline. It entails that ability to: understand the subject matter and meaning within the context of the culture that produced the work, analyze the syntax - compositional and stylistic principles of the work, evaluate the disciplinary and aesthetic merits of the work, and grasp intuitively the gist, the interactive and synergistic quality of the work" (Curtis, quoted in Seels, 1994, p. 104).
Visual literacy continues to be redefined to reflect the technological innovations that are present in society and subsequently in the field of education. For today, Seels states that "The problem with constructing an operational definition of visual literacy is that the term refers to a product not a process, to a condition not a cause, to a state not an action" (p. 104). Visual literacy is encompass by visual communication, visual thinking and visual learning (p. 105).
Moreover, the myriad of visual images emanating from the television were forcing children to become multi-tasking in their ability to extract knowledge from visual materials. Yet, these same children could not maintain their attention long enough to gather the same information from text or by writing. In a speech given at the Symposium for Visual Literacy, Zettl (1993) argues that there has been little change in the medium content, but great change in the presentation. Moreover, he states that "there is an erroneous assumption that it is the degree of pixel manipulation, the way pictures dance rather than the significance of the message that holds us glued to the set" (p. 16). There is an undocumented belief that if students are paying close attention to a video, for example, they will learn from that video. However, more often than not, the attention is directed towards some feature of the video and not the content. Seels (1994) quotes Hewes (1978) on the development of visual systems in our culture. Hewes grants that "people of normal vision who experience the concrete world develop similar visual abilities, but he argues that this fact does not make visual literacy superfluous" (Hewes, 1978, p. 99 cited in Seels). In essence, just because we see, does not mean we understand.
The concern for visual literacy then occurs because there are many applications of visual literacy already used in the classroom. The following lists highlights some examples:
These applications all encourage use of cognitive strategies (West, Farmer, & Wolffe, 1991). Moreover, for successful use of them, students must be able to command their visual thinking and interpretation. The concern for visual literacy is stronger today because of the presence of the Internet in a majority of classrooms. The Internet can simultaneously display multiple media. These media must all be visually processed in order to understand the overall meaning.
Although the use of visual literacy applications is prevalent in the classroom, researchers have found that teachers are not trained in visual literacy themselves. Box and Cochenour (1994) surveyed visual literacy in teacher training programs. These researchers determined that while all the teachers surveyed believed instructional activities for visual literacy very important, only 29% of the institutions address visual literacy as a topic, 14% of those offer it as a course while 86% say it is implicitly integrated. These are ironic and alarming statistics considering what Lockee and Herget (1995) suggest, "the challenge for visual literacy educators is to help enable others to understand the overt messages in visual constructions, and to analyze the less obvious messages that are carried by the images" (p. 366). We can not assume that instructors can be visual literacy educators when they themselves do not possess the background education in it. Moreover, it is quickly becoming the teachers' role to help students "[correlate] their prior knowledge to traditional aesthetic perspectives and to visuals being discussed ... [this] will help students to expand their own visual horizons and more easily understand new stimuli as they are encountered." (Lockee & Hergert, p. 368, 1995). Again, this can only be done if teachers themselves understand visual literacy.
The need for more research in visual literacy is best summarized by Foss & Kanenegreter (1992) who say, "we no longer live in a logocracy - a culture based on verbal text - but in a culture characterized by omnipresent visual images in the forms such as television, film, billboards, architecture and dress" ... and more recently, the Internet. Lockee and Hergert (1995) further this belief by stating that, "an effective image grabs the viewer and says 'this is what I am,' and each viewer processes the information in the image through the filter of his/her frame of reference and will 'know' what the image is saying. Accepting the first take as the truth of the image is often as far as many viewers ever go" (p.367).