Visual Literacy

Where would we be without visual literacy? Our sense of visual literacy allows us to look at photographs, street signs, symbols and anything else that is a still picture and interpret what it means. If we couldn’t encode and decode these visual images, we wouldn’t be able to figure out where the bathroom was or when to cross the street. In today’s society we are surrounded more and more by images and understanding these images is the only way for us to understand our world.  The article about visual literacy activities explains how it is important to study photographs with students in order to help them understand the complexities of the world. Becoming visually literate is a process of encoding and decoding images in a way that allows you to express your own ideas in a visual format and understand the meaning behind other images. This is all very important because photographs tell stories and many of us rely on pictures to tell us a story about historical events or even about our daily news. However, it is important to keep in mind that what you see is not always what you get especially in this day and age when people have access to so many computerized editing tools. Not to say, don’t rely on visual literacy to help you interpret events but remember that in some cases, whoever this image came from, may be biased to a particular viewpoint.  

The branch of telecommunications I am looking to hold a career in is broadcasting/news reporting and this side of the major your job is to report on stories to share with the public audience. Visual literacy allows people to understand and interpret stories through pictures. Therefore, with the increasing dependency on visual literacy, it is pertinent for someone in my position to use images to help clearly explain the story at hand. I feel like this is a major part of telecommunications anyway but it will become much more important in the coming years.

I chose this video about visual literacy because it refers back to idea that teachers should help facilitate the cognitive learning of their students by providing them with a deeper understanding of images in all subject areas. Kids are shown countless numbers of images throughout their educational career whether it be in their teachers PowerPoint’s or in the textbooks and with the help of their teachers they could gain a better sense of visual literacy for these images, thus helping them better comprehend the subject matter. I can personally vouch for this and say that I wish my high school teachers had dug deeper as to guide me in understanding all those geographical maps, scientific charts, and historical photographs. This video shows a number of images that are seen in classrooms in different subjects everyday and without any guidance, one young mind could not fully grasp the complex meaning behind such images. Visually literacy is a very important concept and educators all around the world have the power in their hands to help their students become successful visual learners.