VISUAL LITERACY: ANALYZING WORK TO ENCODE AND DECODE IMAGES, IDEAS, AND MEDIA IN A COMPLEX VISUAL WORLD
Renee Sandell
Maryland Institute College of Art
For people lacking exposure and background in the arts, visual artforms can be perceived as confusing, unintelligible, threatening, and often dismissed as lacking substantive content and meaning. This article addresses the value of art education in promoting visual literacy that enables students to encode and decode the meaning of society's images, ideas, and media of the past as well as our increasingly complex visual world. The involvement of class members in the analysis of their peer's work promotes community building while providing opportunities for students to reflect and hear others discuss meanings conveyed through artworks.
When we look at works or art -- whether by a student or a “master” -- we are looking through a window from which the artist views his or her world. As a visual form of communication, art, like poetry, is a qualitative language that explores how , not what, something is. To fully comprehend the meaning of any work of art, viewers need to carefully “read” a work in terms of its form (how it “is”), subject (what it is about), and context(s) (when, where, by whom, and why it was created and valued), as seen in this equation:
How the work “is” |
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Theme: What the work is about |
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When, where, by whom, and WHY the work was created (and valued) |
To become visually literate, students need skills in helping them meaningfully decipher a variety of visual forms. Examples might include a 17 th century Dutch still life, an African mask, an architectural structure, a puppet show, a handmade quilt, or a U.S. postage stamp, in addition to the vast exposure of the media and its messages in contemporary society that we refer to as visual culture.
Visual Literacy in Visual Culture
Visual images abound and daily bombard learners of all ages, in print and electronic messages--from illustrations and advertised product designs in magazines and books, to television, film, and computer screens. As Terry Barrett (2003) states, “denotations and connotations are at play in all of visual and verbal communication, and their consequences can be much more serious than designers' attempts at influencing our choices of fashions to design and acquire” (p. 6).
In today's “revolving” visual culture, constantly influenced by our highly commercial and digital world, art teachers are concerned with students' need for firsthand sensory experiences in creating and responding. Learners need active strategies to help them encode and decode the meaning of messages contained in images, objects, media, and multidisciplinary contexts.
“A teacher can be 10 times more effective by incorporating visual information into a class discussion…Our brains have more receptors to process the images coming in than the words that we hear,” according to Lynell Burmark (2002), in her ASCD book Visual Literacy: Learn to See, See to Learn. The author offers practical advice for teachers to use more visual elements and images in instruction to captivate the mind's eye as well as asking students to contribute their own drawings or original photos rather than ready-made clip art.
Visual literacy is promoted through developed skills in visual problem solving and critical thinking. Art education cultivates values and abilities for living a qualitative life enhanced through two vital processes: Creative Expression and Critical Response, both used as Indicators of Learning for each expectation of the Visual Art Outcome in MSDE's Fine Arts Essential Learner Outcomes (2000, p. xxvi).
Creative Expression helps students encode ideas, beliefs and feelings through an expanding process in which they generate ideas, elaborate and refine ideas, then finally shape ideas into a meaningful visual form. According to Bill Ivey, former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, “If our children don't learn to shape images, images will shape them” ( Maryland Classroom , 2002, p. 1).
Critical Response helps students decode ideas through an informing process in which they perceive, interpret, and finally judge visual ideas of the past and present. Since the processes feed into one another, art teachers have become increasingly aware that teaching creative studio skills without critical response skills is like teaching writing to people who cannot read. As visual reading specialists, art teachers can foster visual literacy by actively engaging students in visual inquiry experiences, in which students proactively seek firsthand knowledge and tangible evidence like an archeologist or detective.
Looking at Student Work
A teacher's own way of regarding student work both models and influences its potential meaningfulness and personal value. Aside from the teacher's need to assess student work (based on established criteria used to create it), the class critique provides an opportunity for all students to reflect as they and their classmates discuss meanings conveyed through artworks made as unique solutions to assigned studio problems. While developing empathy for diverse viewpoints as well as stimulating new ideas and visual approaches, student conversations with peers can be deep, layered, and enlightening.
Teachers can use a variety of approaches to facilitate the comprehension of art through classroom critiques of studio work. In Talking About Student Art , Terry Barrett (2000) modifies the typically teacher-directed studio critique to promote greater meaning of artworks in the following ways: (a) empowering students as viewers as central to the critique, (b) emphasizing interpretation(s) over evaluation, and (c) using the critique to develop skills in art criticism.
As teachers facilitate effective class critiques, they foster student reflection on what matters while affirming students' visual expression of personal ideas through divergent thinking. The sharing of student work through constructive critical responses builds visual literacy skills, along with an important sense of classroom community and an appreciation of diversity in art and humanity.
We are living and teaching in a globally-challenging time in which visual literacy skills are critically needed for clearer perception and interaction, while, at the same time, combating our overexposure to images and objects, many of which “convey information, afford pleasure and displeasure, influence style, determine consumption, and mediate power relations” (Rogoff, 1998, p. 15).
The important lessons that the arts teach (Eisner, 2000, p. 16) are more important than ever. By promoting visual literacy strategies in the classroom, teachers of art and other subjects can empower learners to creatively express and critically respond to ideas, forms and contexts throughout the history of humankind, augmenting germane communication skills and invaluable cultural understanding.
Ten Lessons the Arts Teach Elliot Eisner
• The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail. • The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer. • The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are any ways to see and interpret the world. • The arts teach children that, in complex forms of problem solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds. • The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition. • The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties. • The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real. • The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job. • The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. • The arts'position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
From Eisner, E. “Ten Lessons the Arts Teach.” In Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries. Proceedings from an invitational meeting for Education, Arts and Youth Funders, held January 12 –14, 2000, Los Angeles. Organized by Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, and The John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation. |
References
“Assignment: Media Literacy.” Maryland Classroom , MSDE publication, October 2002, 8 (1), p. 1.
Barrett, T. (1997). Talking About Student Art. Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, Inc.
Barrett, T. (March, 2003). “Interpreting Visual Culture.” Art Education. 56 (2), pp. 6-12.
Boughton, D. (1986). “Visual Literacy: Implications for Cultural Understanding through Art Education.” Journal of Art & Design Education , 5 (1 & 2), 125-142.
Burmark, L. (2002) Visual Literacy: Learn to See, See to Learn. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Eisner, E. “Ten Lessons the Arts Teach.” In Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries. Proceedings from an invitational meeting for Education, Arts and Youth Funders held January 12 –14, 2000, Los Angeles. Organized by Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, and The John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation.
Goldonowicz, J. (November 1985). “Art and Other Subjects.” Art Education , p. 17.
Rogoff, I. (1998). Studying visual culture. In N. Mirzoeff (Ed.), The Visual Culture Reader. (pp. 14-26). London: Routledge.
“Visual Arts Essential Learner Outcomes.” (2000). Fine Arts Essential Learner Outcomes. Maryland State Department of Education.
About the Author:
Dr. Renee Sandell is Professor of Art Education at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Director, Higher Education Division, National Art Education Association. She may be reached at rsandell@mica.edu