Visual "Literacy": Image, Minds, and Reality

Visual Literacy and Visual Culture

Familiarity with specific images or sets of images plays a role in a culture's visual heritage. Two questions can be asked about this type of visual literacy: Is this a type of knowledge that is worth building into the formal educational curriculum of our schools? What are the educational implications of visual literacy? There is a three-part educational rationale to these questions. First, kno...

Film: Visual Literacy

People who write about movies have traditionally referred to the conventions of cinematic representation—such things as low-angle shots, fade-outs, or flashbacks—as the “language” of film. Does the ability to understand this language require previous experience? Or, to put this question differently, would a “naive” viewer, someone who had never seen a movie before, be able to make any sense of ...

Making Mathematical Literacy a Reality in Classrooms

Modelling of new problems is at the heart of mathematical literacy, because many situations that arise in adult life and work cannot be predicted, let alone taught at school. There are now plenty of examples of the successful teaching of modelling at all levels – yet it is to be found in few classrooms. How can every mathematics teacher be brought to teaching modelling reasonably effectively? T...

Conceptual Problems Of Visual Literacy

1 Perspective Of Visual Literacy

An alternative to the common approach to defining concepts is introduced, where the primary goal is to point to what is large and essential in a concept, that is, to its perspective. Based on this new approach, visual literacy is defined as the ability to decode and design implicit information. It is argued that such literacy is no less needed than the common literacy, which is the ability to r...