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…

The so-called millennial learners who currently populate college classrooms are purportedly digital natives whose repeated exposure to a host of new technologies has allegedly resulted in enhanced skills in several areas, including those related to technology and visual communication. By extension, the argument has been made that digital natives…

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…

This exploratory study investigated student reaction to the use of cartoons as advance organizers for online discussions in an online course. A convenience sample of 15 students participated in the study by contributing cartoons, participating in online discussions, and completing a survey. Overall, survey results indicated student reaction to the…

This research describes how eight pre-service teachers interpreted and analyzed instructional visuals, defined visual literacy, and assessed the effectiveness of four instructional images. A phenomenological procedure was used to collect, organize, and analyze the data. Findings suggest that pre-service teachers in this study were able to define…

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…

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,…