Visual Literacy: An Undervalued and Misunderstood Skill.

Alex BallantyneR.M.H.S

Emily O’Conner, AP Photography, 2009

Objectives of Presentation

Informing you of some of the issues. Providing you with some historical and

contextual background. Providing some examples of visual data. Raising your conscious awareness of

visual literacy as a problem in need of a solution.

Context

Visual Literacy is multifaceted and not well understood throughout the education profession. It has become a focus of research.

A movement to understand how students learn about, and from, visual information has been growing over the past twenty years.

There is much to learn about the mechanisms and processes of student learning via visual information.

What is Visual Literacy?

The skill set that provides a student with the ability to understand, interpret and analyze visual information.

It has a tendency to be an ad-hoc learning process for the majority of students.

Often there is implicit as opposed to explicit teaching.

It has become a vital skill for students as a result of dramatic technological changes in media and computers over the past thirty years.

Visual Reasoning starts to develop at about 7 ½ years of age.

Anton Lawson’s classicMellinark test was used toestablish when children startto have the capacity to reasonfrom visual information.

All of these are Mellinarks

None of these are Mellinarks

Which of these are Mellinarks?

A New Terminology

Visual Literacy “Visual literacy is the ability to understand and use images, including the

ability to think, learn, and express oneself in terms of images” Braden and Hortin. (1982)

Graphicacy The ability to understand visual information.

Aldrich and Sheppard (2000)

Critical Graphicacy The ability to understand, interpret and generate a new

synthesis from visual data. Roth, W-M., Pozzer-Ardenghi, L. & Han, J. Y. (2005).

Visual Intelligence The Eye-Brain system’s capacity to process visual information.

“intelligent process of active construction” Hoffman, (1998)

Visual literacy – A changing perspective

Filippo Bruneschelli invented the technique of perspective in two dimensional art in 1450 AD. He painted a faithful image of the Battistero del San Giovanni in Florence that was indistinguishable from the actual building.

The Artist as Scientist and Scientist as Artist!

The idea of the Vanishing Point. We are currently going through

a similar shift in perspective!

Realism in Art during the Renaissance used the magic of perspective

The Disputation of St. Stephen by Carpaccio(1514 AD) uses a singlevanishing point. The painting only uses perspective correctlywhen viewed directly in frontof the vanishing point.

Changing Media – Changing perspectives!

3D Computer Graphics using Bryce 5 and 6 Software with Photoshop. Multiple vanishing pointsDimeter Dimitrov (Bulgaria)

Our View of the World is Influenced by Biology

Claude Monet: The Japanese bridge and water-lily pond at Giverny, 1899.Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Perception is governed by the Eye!

Suffering from cataracts, Monet painted the Japanese bridge shown here in the period 1918-24.

[Minneapolis Museum of Art.]

How doe the eye work?

Light is focused on the retina,Where it is absorbed, generatinga set of electrical signals, whichare sent to the visual cortex of the brain via the optical nerve. The most sensitive region ofThe retina is the macula andfovea.

Color vision is complex and an evolutionary addition in higher animals.

Will lowry: human_cone_action_spectra.gif

Visual deficiencies lead to differences in perspective. Can this have an impact on student learning?

Will Lowry: colorblindness.jpg

A Teachable Moment! A Story about a Tee-Shirt and a Peanut!

Did you know that chipmunks are dichromatic? (only two types of cones)

Jeffwongdesign.blogspot.com

PATHWAYS FOR VISUAL PERCEPTION IN THE BRAIN

Primary visual cortex (V1) has multiple processing regions for different types of visual data.

V1 is retinotopically mapped. [with respect to the image on the retina]

Lateral Geniculate Nucleus is centered on the Thalamus, but is also connected to the Amygdala

Tovee, 1999

Visualization through computer graphics is now central to data presentation and interpretation, especially in the neurosciences and studies of human and primate vision

Studies of vision now rely on “mapping’ to communicateIdeas and expand our knowledgeof the processes involved in visual intelligence. We see how to see by looking at how we see! The more we know, the higherthe level of visual abstraction werequire in order to make sense of this knowledge.

Tootell, Tsao and Vanduffel, 2003, J. Neuroscience

Visual data presentation and analysis has become a major tool in studies of the brain.

Functional MRI techniques usingDiffusion Tensor Imaging [DTI] Reveals the interwoven structureof the axons in the brain.[From Lens,Vanderbilt Medical Center, 2009]

The visual cortex of the brain seeks patterns – our eye is drawn to them!

Alex Ortiz, AP Photography, 2009 Thomas Feeney, AP Photography, 2009

The Art of Illusion!

The Necker Cube illustrates Hoffman’s view that “we construct what we see”.

It is not only amazing that we “see” two differentcubes but rather that we “see” a cube at all!

Pommeranz, Rice University

The genius of visual intelligence.The image we see can be Virtual!

Our visual intelligence constructs a 3D interpretation of the image using a set of rules which belies the 2D nature of both image and object.

Pommeranz, Rice University