As an artist, learning stuff by seeing it really helps me, and as I’ve come to learn in my English class discussions that visual literacy is becoming more mainstream. Our world is becoming a media filled place and therefore we need to become visually literate to be able to read, interpret, understand, and use visual images in our lives to express, teach, or support our ideas. So I’m going to provide some info on the broad field of visual literacy, and some interesting sources providing further information if you are interested!

<http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy>.

This page from the website of the American Library Association presents a detailed coverage of visual literacy. In the first sections it provides a thorough definition of what visual literacy is and what its uses are in our society today “a visual culture”. This definition can clear up any uncertainties regarding visual literacy, its purposes, and how it is being utilized in both the workforce and classroom. The website contributors also seem to focus on visual literacy in regards to higher education and provide a list of how they feel a “visually literate” person in higher education should be able to use their understanding of visual literacy to research, analyze, and effectively implement images and other visual aids into their presentations. The page further stresses the Seven Standards of Visual Literacy, and all seven standards are specifically outlined and described in the later portion of the website. These standards are especially helpful if someone wishes to learn about the specific aspects to visual literacy since it is such a broad field, and this page is perfect if one would want the specifics on how visual literacy is used by teachers. The contributors have presented an extensive and easy to understand outline of the standards that appears to be an integral part of this source; it describes how visual aids should be used, researched, implemented, and described as well as covering the ethical and cultural differences that may come into play when using visual aids or images of any kind.

<http://www.vislit.org/visual-literacy/>.

Brian Kennedy narrates this short video on how visual literacy works and how humans become visually literate. He stresses that our world is becoming “visually saturated”, meaning that images are all around, spanning from classical artworks to stop signs. This video and narration effectively describes visual literacy as a concept and emphasizes that people need to not only become better readers, but they must also improve in successfully reading images around them. By describing the history of visual literacy and the simple definition of it being the process of sending or receiving messages primarily through images, Kennedy Illustrates the differences between visual literacy and all the other literacy categories quite simply. Kennedy is also the first person to point out, through this video, that visual literacy is a form of critical thinking and not a skill. He further argues that visual literacy is quite an overshadowed topic compared to computer and sensory literacy, but that visual literacy is an extremely critical aspect to classroom learning than most give it credit for. This is a wonderful source for anyone in need of a history of visual literacy or an argument for the support of visual literacy. Kennedy argues that visual literacy is the most important literacy, and it must be taught, because our strongest sense is vision and we rely on our vision and interpreting images every day, that is visual literacy.

http://www.iste.org/docs/excerpts/medlit-excerpt.pdf>.

This Chapter on Visual Literacy comes from Frank Baker’s book Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom. Chapter 3 starts out by defining visual literacy as the ability to understand and read images. Baker then presents several examples of images all throughout history (such as “Migrant Mother”) that cover aspects of visual literacy and the various ways these images can be read or interpreted by all sorts of people. Visual literacy used to be primarily within the art classroom residing in critiques of artists’ works and noting or analyzing the techniques or reasons why the artist did what they did to create the visual piece. Frank elaborates upon the standards in being literate in reading visual images and also delves further into the aspects that make art or photography images what they are. Audiences can now see there are more to simple images that we use daily than meets the eye.

Baker’s chapter upon visual literacy proves immensely helpful in dealing with the artistic aspects to visual literacy. It provides the basic definition and examples of the concept, but it delves a bit farther by providing examples of how visual literacy can vary person to person. This book chapter establishes a strong bridge between the educational side to visual literacy and the artistic side to it that deals with aspects such as composition, lighting, angle, and colors or lack thereof. Baker points out that there is more to visual literacy than just the image, there is a whole process behind it.

These 3 major sources provided me with a solid introduction into the broad field that is visual literacy, when I knew hardly anything, now I know truly, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”