Visual Literacy: Helping Students Better Understand the Visual World Around Them

Visual literacy is defined by Finley as, "the ability to interpret, recognize, appreciate, and understand information presented through visible actions, objects, and symbols, natural or man-made." In a world filled with visuals (pictures, videos, memes, graphs, charts, etc), visual literacy is now a crucial skill for all students to have.

When we were young, before we could read, we read picture books and had to interpret what was happening based solely on the images. This is only the start to visual literacy. The words used to describe an image are hugely important in visual literacy. If you do not have the vocabulary set, then trying to explain what an image is showing you and how it relates to what you are learning is going to be extremely difficult.

For our final rotating chair, Mike introduced some thought provoking questions. The first question was how has visual literacy helped you learn and when could you have used it?

As a biology concentration, most of my classes are taught by displaying images and describing what is going on. Without images in biology, we can only propose what something looks like and how it functions. Once we have a good understanding of the shape of a macromolecule, we will be able to confirm its function(s). Also, it is necessary that we are able to interpret graphs and other data that record the results of different experiments and describe in words what the data shows.

When I could've used a visual aid was in my many years of math classes, in which I struggled. I was never able to draw connections between formulas, and for that reason, I never knew which one to apply and why.

The other huge question Mike asked was how we could incorporate visual literacy into our classrooms. My response was, "Videos Videos Videos!". In science, you can only get a certain level of understanding of how something works from words. After that, everyone has a different image in their heads, which may not always be correct. By showing videos (or at least animated images) I can provide my students with a visual understanding of how something functions. This will also be helpful to the students who did not understand the concept well when only explained in words. I also will have my students be explaining what the graph or result shown is representing, since this is a hugely important skill to have in the field of science... and everyday.