Most of what we know comes from what we see. Ninety per cent of information transmitted to our brain is visual. We interact with images before we interact with words. Infants, who cannot read or write, can click on their favourite icon on a phone to play the video of their choice. Yet, most schools still consider reading, writing, and numeracy as the only essential skills worth learning.
Today, we live in an image-laden world. To experience this world beyond what we see and then understand, evaluate, use, and create more images is integral to our success in life. According to a study featured in The Times of India in September 2023, 60% of children (aged nine to seventeen) spend three hours daily on social media or gaming sites in India. This data reflects the amount of exposure our children have to the visual world. While we often consider this data only in terms of its ill effects on children’s mental health, we ought to act and empower our children to be capable and responsible media consumers as well as creators.
In a paper titled "News Literacy: Teaching the Internet Generation to Make Reliable Information Choices," published on July 3, 2014, James Klurfled and Howard Schneider argued that “better-trained journalists and professional gatekeepers” will not be able to curb rumours and false news. The responsibility for combating these issues will fall on “astutely educated news consumers, as well as native producers and distributors, who will learn to be their own editors and identify for themselves fact- and evidence-based news and information.” By 2024, we see this prophecy to have come true.
Dana Statton Thompson, in her 2019 article "Teaching students to critically read digital images: a visual literacy approach using the DIG method" published in the Journal of Visual Literacy, emphasizes the urgency of teaching students how to evaluate images. She states, “With the emergence of fake news articles and ‘deep fake’ videos on social media within the past two years, it is now imperative to incorporate techniques to teach students how to evaluate images in the classroom. By turning a critical eye towards these types of images and learning how to critically read digital images, students can increase their visual literacy skills and their critical thinking skills in tandem. Both of these skill sets are necessary for students to become discerning citizens who understand the role images play in communication today.”
Tools of visual literacy
The term “Visual Literacy” was first used in 1969 by John Debes, one of the organization’s founding fathers of the International Visual Literacy Association. Debes considered visual literacy to be a competency that enables a human being to communicate with others and “discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment.” The 21st-century skills of communication, critical thinking, and creativity are the gifts that a visually literate person enjoys. Visual literacy offers a great opportunity to discover implicit meaning. Visuals not only denote; they also connote. In fact, talking becomes a resource in the classroom that uses visual literacy as a pedagogical tool.
Media Literacy Now, founded by Eric McNeill in 2013, suggests that “like reading or math, media literacy is learned. The ability to navigate within our complex and ever-changing media landscape depends on acquiring skills and tools to know how to consume and evaluate information, ask critical questions, avoid manipulation, and engage in digital spaces safely and confidently. Unfortunately, these skills are not widely taught to our young people – yet. Media literacy is not meant to be an add-on to an already full curriculum. It’s an educational approach or practice that establishes a habit of inquiry that is content-neutral and can be applied in any classroom.”
In fact, visual literacy is a very effective tool to practise Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the classroom. It encompasses a range of visuals, from images, maps, charts, graphs, sketches, and diagrams to short animations, videos, films or film clips, story mountains, graphic novels, GIFs, and memes. The best time to start is kindergarten. Photo labels are a great tool for this age group. The Literacy Shed website offers a wide range of visual literacy resources.
Project Look Sharp, which offers lessons on media literacy, considers asking questions to be of utmost importance. Teachers must help students reflect on how they use media and what impacts their choices and decisions. They should aim to help students acquire the skills needed to “navigate their mediated world (and less about protecting students from “harmful” media messages).” Assessment of students’ visual literacy skills can be done by asking them to present their learning using videos, diagrams, sketches, concept maps, presentations, etc. Students are certainly more motivated to share their learning as they know their peers (a more authentic audience) will also be reviewing their work. These tools also offer great support to children with special needs and make the classroom inclusive. Visual literacy improves learning outcomes. It is important to remember the outcome while designing lessons and assessments on visual literacy. The student should be able to identify a fake visual, look at an advertisement and decide whether the product is worth buying, or look at a graph and draw the requisite inference, to name a few.
Cinema as a medium
One of the very important components of visual literacy is cinema literacy. Martin Scorsese exhorts, “You have to make room for film in the curriculum. What you are doing is training the eye and the heart of the student to look at film differently by asking questions and pointing to different ideas, and different concepts. You're training them to think about a story that is told in visual terms differently and to take it seriously. It is so important, I think because so much in today's society is communicated visually and even subliminally. Young people have to know that this way of communicating is a very, very powerful tool.”
Cinema literacy improves cognitive abilities. When students take a deep dive into cinematography, lighting, and composition, they are able to critically evaluate and interpret visual information. Films offer an opportunity to think, feel, reflect, and eventually become capable of engaging in thoughtful discussions. They make students aware of diverse cultures, different periods of history, and social milieus, and in turn, make them emotionally intelligent as they learn to value different perspectives in the process of critically analyzing the film. They are a perfect tool for cross-disciplinary teaching. Catherine Gourley opines that using movies to teach history is not the objective of cinema literacy. Students can gather knowledge of other disciplines, including history and social studies, to read the movie. The language of films is both universal and persuasive. This helps students to view the past through the lens of the present.
The Story of Movies, an interdisciplinary film literacy program for classrooms, prescribes to begin by inferring the meaning of the movie by focusing on what the story is about, who the characters and their conflicts are, and what action takes place. The next step is to analyze cinematic devices and styles. It is important to introduce students to the grammar of films before attempting this. The third step is to draw students’ attention to the context in which the film was created. The Story of Movies Curriculum treats film as a language, a cultural document, and a collaborative art. It also suggests observing the care between “watching” and “seeing” a film. Watching draws attention to the images and sounds, and seeing implies understanding. Roman Krznaric, an Australian philosopher, opines, “Cinema offers opportunities for stepping into the shoes of people whose lives we may never have a chance to understand through direct experience or conversation. We can all develop the habit of valuing films not just for their ability to entertain us but for their capacity to stimulate us to think and act with greater sensitivity.”
As an educator, I’ve always found a lot of value in Bloom’s Taxonomy (a hierarchical model used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity, encompassing cognitive skills such as remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating) but have craved a tool to impact the affective domain. Learning is all about experience. Children learn when they feel free to voice their sentiments and are happy. They bloom when they experience a connection with themselves and others. Visual literacy offers these deeper connections and learning experiences in a world that is often devoid of feelings and emotions. However, schools can alter this script by using visual literacy to their advantage. They have the power to shape the world, and visual literacy surely offers a huge promise! “…taking a step back, slowing down, looking closer, deconstructing whatever is in front of you, so that you can understand it, so that you can put it back together” (Visual Literacy Association Conference) equips an individual to live a full life.
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