Through reading these two articles, I could not only have better understanding about the importance of leaning Visual Literacy but also make a connection with Visual Thinking Strategies. I agree with Feldman’s educational perspective toward visual literacy that the most important is that there is a language of images and that it can be learned. Besides, from my experience that I have had with my students, I think it is absolutely possible for teachers to effectively develop the students’ visual literacy though the VTS instruction. That is because VTS could contain many different kinds of disciplines such as study art-history of art, iconology, art criticism, and aesthetic as Feldman mentioned through the wide and open discussions.
I know most viewers including museum visitors and students would be Stage 1 or Stage 2. (There might be a transition zone and some might belong to that.) As Yenawine points out, if the Stage1 and Stage 2 viewer would be considered as “pre-literate”, does it means, sadly enough, most people might not know how to read and write the language of image even though they couldn’t realize that during their entire life? That sounds really sad.
Influenced by Housen’s researches, I believe the one of reasons why visual literacy education is important is that not only literacy but also visual literacy could be imperatively necessary when cognitive learning occurs in order to understand concepts inside the images and make meanings throughout not only text but also images. As a proponent of VTS, because of those reasons, I believe VTS should be widely used in the education in order to develop and enhance visual literacy.
I share your sadness that some museum visitors will never move beyond being "preliteratie" and even sadder, never know that they don't know!
ReplyDeleteI am reading more and more articles that place visual literacy on the same level of importance as verbal/alphabetic literacy. That is encouraging. It means that verbal/alphabetic literacy is quickly loosing its monopoly. And in an increasingly global world, with many languages and cultural symbol systems, I think it is imperative that we prepare students for multimodal understanding.