Visual Literacy - Background

Background

The term “visual literacy” is credited to John Debes, co-founder of the International Visual Literacy Association. In 1969 Debes offered a tentative definition of the concept: “Visual literacy refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences.” A white paper drawn up in January 2004, defines visual literacy as "understanding how people perceive objects, interpret what they see, and what they learn from them." However, because multiple disciplines such as visual literacy in education, art history and criticism, rhetoric, semiotics, philosophy, information design, and graphic design make use of the term visual literacy, arriving at a common definition of visual literacy has been contested since its first appearance in professional publications.

Since technological advances continue to develop at an unprecedented rate, educators are increasingly promoting the learning of visual literacies as indispensable to life in the information age. Similar to linguistic literacy (meaning making derived from written or oral human language) commonly taught in schools, most educators would agree that literacy in the 21st Century has a wider scope. Educators are recognizing the importance of helping students develop visual literacies in order to survive and communicate in a highly complex world.

Many scholars from the New London Group such as Courtney Cazden, James Gee, Gunther Kress, and Allan Luke advocate against the dichotomy of visual literacy versus linguistic literacy. Instead, they stress the necessity of accepting the co-presence of linguistic literacies and visual literacies as interacting and interlacing modalities which complement one another in the meaning making process.

Visual literacy is not limited to modern mass media and new technologies. The graphic novel Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud discusses the history of narrative in visual media. Also, animal drawings in ancient caves, such as the one in Lascaux, France, are early forms of visual literacy. Hence, even though the name visual literacy itself as a label dates to the 1960s, the concept of reading signs and symbols is prehistoric.

Visual literacy is the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations. Skills include the evaluation of advantages and disadvantages of visual representations, to improve shortcomings, to use them to create and communicate knowledge, or to devise new ways of representing insights. The didactic approach consists of rooting visualization in its application contexts, i.e. giving the necessary critical attitude, principles, tools and feedback to develop their own high-quality visualization formats for specific problems (problem-based learning). The commonalities of good visualization in diverse areas, and exploration of the specificities of visualization in the field of specialization (through real-life case studies).

Visual Literacy Standards for teaching in higher education were adopted by the Association of College & Research Libraries in 2012. They were "developed over a period of 19 months, informed by current literature, shaped by input from multiple communities and organizations, reviewed by individuals from over 50 institutions, and approved by 3 ACRL committees and the ACRL Board of Directors."