Teaching with Pictures and Graphics

The Concept of Visual Literacy

Visual literacy is a learned ability to interpret visual messages (such as designs, symbols, or pictures) accurately and to create such messages.

Visual literacy runs parallel to print literacy which is the ability to read and write printed words. Visual literacy has become a movement within communication and education.

Visuals are iconic, meaning they normally resemble the thing they represent. Realism is one quality of visual messages which we should attend to. No media form is totally realists. Visuals tend to become less useful for communication/instruction as they breach the extremes of being abstract or very realistic. Teachers using the visual literacy approach find it necessary to know a good deal more about media pictures, graphics, slides, films, and so forth than most of us do. This is because the crux of the visual literacy approach is for students to communicate by means of pictures or other visual media.

Flat Pictures

Flat pictures describe illustrations in magazines and books, photographs, study prints, and the like pictures that can be examined without benefit of a projector or viewer.

Still pictures is a broader term for any kind of nonmoving pictures, projected or not. Thus slides, transparencies, and filmstrips, as well as flat pictures are still pictures.