Reading Images Part 2: A picture is worth 1,000 words (What Visual Literacy Looks Like)

Reading Images Part 2: A picture is worth 1,000 words (What Visual Literacy Looks Like)

Jim Burke’s chapter on visual images in Illuminating Texts is fascinating! There is so much exciting and interesting information on images and visual literacy that the chapter will warrant at least three posts! The information is thrilling as for me as a teacher but I also think the idea of images as language will captivate students.

This is part 2 of 3.

Burke writes, and we as teachers know, that everyone thinks differently. Many people think in pictures and can understand abstract ideas when they are illustrated and they can see what the idea looks like.

He quotes Temple Grandin, “I think in pictures. Words are a second language to me.” He also describes that physicist Stephen Hawking developed “an entire lexicon of shapes and images for himself, a geometric vocabulary through which he could describe the world he spent his time trying to understand. Vincent Van Gogh tried to describe his style of thinking to his brother in a letter. He wrote, “Really, we [artists] can speak only through our paintings.”

Burke relates this to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, Howard Gardner discusses, in depth, Van Gogh and other artists. Their intelligence is “special” which is “the capacity to perceive the visual world accurately to perform transformations and modifications upon one’s initial perceptions and to be able to re-create physical stimuli.’”

Burke goes on to quote Donald Hoffman, author of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. Hoffman says, “Vision is not merely a matter of passive perception, it is an intelligent process of active construction. What you see is, invariably, what your visual intelligence constructs.” Burke explains that this means “to see is to read, or, to paraphrase Shakespeare, all the world is a text and we are merely readers of it.”

We’re constantly encountering images. Images can be used to:

• Describe
• Explain
• Narrate
• Persuade

Examples include:

Photographs of the scientific process which explain the process (textbook pages)

Stained glass windows, which tell a historical, cultural story (like the windows at Chartres)

Photographs of a natural disaster that describes the scale and nature of the disaster (like the BP oil spill, the tornado in Joplin, MO or the earthquake in Japan)

Countless of advertisements, in which people use images to persuade us about ourselves and their products.

Burke also discusses the book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design by Kress and van Leeuwen. “The book’s guiding principle is that we should teach children to recognize the choices authors (which her includes artists, Webmasters, mathematicians, scientists, journalists) make and then realize the consequences of those decisions insofar as they change the meaning of text or affect the reader. It is through conscious and unconscious use of this grammatical sense that we convey, and, as readers, discern meanings and motivations of not only the author but also the characters within the text, as well as ourselves.”

Visual literacy has been defined as follows:

From the beginnings of human culture, visual awareness has been a key element to communication. Just as information conveyed by the written world holds a significance for humanity in the 20th century, the symbols of early cave paintings held a deep significance for the artists and cultures that produced them. Over time these symbols and meanings changed into the alphabets of the world of today, which are the basis for verbal literacy.

To be verbally literate, one must posses and be able to manipulate the basic components of written language: the letters, words, spelling, grammar, syntax. With the mastery of these elements of written communication, the possibilities of verbal expression are endless. Visual literacy must operate within the same boundaries. Just as there are components and common meaning for the elements of verbal literacy, elements and common meaning exist for the elements of visual literacy.

The fundamentals of all visual communication are its basic elements; the compositional source for all kinds of visual materials, messages, objects, experiences…

The elements are summarized in the following list:

• the dot [the most basic of visual elements], a pointer, marker of space
• the line, the restless articulator of form, in the probing looseness of the sketch and the tighter technical plan
• shape, the basic outlines, circle, triangle, and square
• direction, the surge of movement that promotes character of the basic shapes
• value, the most basic of all the laments, the presence or absence of light
• hue and saturation, the make up of color---coordination of value with added component of chroma
• texture, optical or tactile, the surface characteristic of visual materials
• scale, the relative size and measurements of an image
• dimension and motion, both implied through sfumato and other techniques

These are the visual elements; from them we draw the raw materials for all levels of visual intelligence. It is with the understanding of these elements that a viewer can come to understand visual syntax. Visual literacy is the ability, through knowledge of the basic visual elements, to understand the meaning and components of the image.

Burke also writes that many scholars argue that our “entire social evolution is moving toward the increased use of images to communicate more efficiently and effectively.” Our culture understands a visual language made up of images and movements with its own grammar, abbreviations, clichés, lies, puns, and famous quotations.

Incorporating images into the classroom (in any content area) provides an important facet of literacy and opportunities for students to make meaning. Images speak to learners.