In our essay we discuss Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of a reading event. Second, we summarize Carole Cox and Joyce Many who applied the transactional theory and designed a 1-5 point continuum to stories and films. Third, we summarize film theorists David Bordwell's constructivism; Richard Wollheim's central imagining and…

Students who have difficulty with academics often benefit from learning mnemonic strategies which provide a step-by-step process to accomplish a task. Three fourth-grade students who struggled with writing learned the Ask, Reflect, Text (ART) strategy to help them produce more elaborate narrative story text. After initially asking the questions…

Literacy educators might advocate using graphic novels to develop students' visual literacy skills, but teachers who lack a vocabulary for engaging in close analysis of visual texts may be reluctant to teach them. Recognizing this, teacher educators should equip preservice teachers with a vocabulary for analyzing visual texts. This article…

This paper highlights the results of a project, in which a group of students, who were enrolled in an African American film criticism course at a large university in Southern California, participated in a community engagement project that incorporated visual and media literacy skills acquired in the classroom setting. The parameters of the project…

Visual data differs from visual information since it must be recorded, analyzed, and manipulated in some manner, whereas visual information is primarily sensory input. Our environment is constantly infused with visual inputs, and it is sometimes difficult to make sense of them or to determine how best to deal with them for instructional purposes…

An archivist from a kibbutz in the north of Israel has been managing the kibbutz archive for close to a decade. I have chosen to present her enterprise and the role she is playing by means of her archival work, which is changing the historiography of her kibbutz. The archivist at the kibbutz in question reevaluates her kibbutz's history while…

Despite the fact that to date Visual Literacy (VL) scholars have not arrived at a general consensus for a theoretical organization of the VL field, important conceptual investigations have emerged over the past four decades. In this paper we discuss and synthesize those studies. We then present a first attempt toward a cohesive theory of VL. The…

Describes the nature of online chats in terms of how graduate students structured their conversations in online group discussions, and how they participated and conversed in and across concurrent conversations. Characteristics of the computer medium contributed to the conversational structures and the kinds of structures affected interactivity and…

Describes how instructional television and other existing videos can be repurposed to develop theory-based interactive videodiscs. Barriers to videodisc use in education are discussed; and two models are described that integrate curriculum theory and cognitive learning theory in the creation of social studies and foreign language curriculum…

Discussion of visual literacy, visual cognition, visual thinking and learning, and visual knowledge focuses on women and gender differences. Topics addressed include educational equality and the visual, including equality versus difference; women and mass culture; difference and the design of visual instruction; and feminist education and the…

From a cognitive point of view, students construct new knowledge frameworks by relating new information to prior knowledge. Visual constructions help students reestablish unity of knowledge from "bits" of information received in linear note taking. Discusses the benefits of note taking and review, and summarizes visual note-taking methods and the…

Discusses data modeling and its relation to computer systems design and describes the components of a distance education course including 13 half-hour videos designed to prepare systems analysts. Highlights aspects of the seventh unit dealing with data modeling. Appendices outline the 13 units of the information technology distance course and…

Illustrates reader-response theory by discussing a piece of Chinese art, "A Book from the Sky." Examines the relationship between and among viewer, text or artwork, and artist; and attempts to determine the meanings viewers of different ages, genders, ethnicity, and professions construct in reaction to the work of art and to postmodern art in…

This project looks at the body of literature related to visual communication and the categories that emerge from the writings to develop a taxonomy of topics and some sense of the location of the most important, or at least the most frequently written about, areas of study. (Author/LRW)

Discusses concepts of semiotics relevant to visual literacy and stresses two important points of intersection: active perception and diversity of sign systems. Argues that an educational program with a semiotic framework would change its focus from content to process, and that a visual literacy component would enhance learning across modalities,…