Learning With Images

Hi fellow teacher friends,
For my first official 'learning' post, I wanted to share a couple of articles I have synthesized.

Kovalik, Cindy and Peggy King (n.d.). Visual Literacy, Retrieved February 8, 2008, from Kent State University Website: http://www.educ.kent.edu/community/VLO/

Riklan, David (2004). How to Immediately Determine which of the Top 3 Learning Styles Will Work Best for You, Retrieved February 9, 2008, from Self Growth Website: http://www.selfgrowth.com/gwlesson3.html

Stokes, Suzanne (2001.). Visual Literacy in Teaching and Learning: A Literature Perspective. Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education, 1(1) 10-19. Available at: http://ejite.isu.edu/Volume1No1/pdfs/stokes.pdf


Kovalik and King (n.d.) define visual literacy as “the ability to understand, create, and use visual images”. Their research shows that visual literacy has three parts: visual thinking, visual communication, and visual learning. Visual thinking is where a person must develop thoughts or ideas based on an image. Visual communication is where those thoughts and ideas are used to express an idea to people. Lastly, visual learning is when something is learned from an image. I believe that people do learn with images because people do apply thinking, communicating, and learning by simply looking at an image.
“Without image, thinking is impossible”, is a quote by Aristotle (as cited in Stokes, pg. 10). I think this quote sums up the entire idea of visual literacy. You cannot understand written text without applying some type of prior knowledge or understanding. Prior knowledge is the development of an image or an experience (likely a visual representation) to understand something. Riklan (2004) reports that around 65 percent of the population are visual learners. This means that they construct some type of image in their minds to interpret meaning. Visual literacy, in my opinion is simply putting a label on what 65 percent of us do daily to interpret meaning.
Visual literacy can be a powerful tool for learning in the classroom. Stokes mentioned many things in her article that I agree with when it comes to discussing the importance and impact of visual literacy. In my personal experience I have found that written text accompanied by graphics are far more beneficial for lower students than just written text. When students do not have a vast bank of prior knowledge to pull from, they need to see an image to make a connection to gain meaning. Images can play a major key in whether a student gains meaning or not. Another one of Stokes research findings related to achievement being higher when using color images versus using black and white images. I can also agree with this finding because I find that color brings more meaning to an image by expressing the image to a fuller extent. Color, for example, shows that grass is green and the sky can be many shades of blue. Black and white images do not portray the richness of that understanding.
Learning through images is also a very important tool with students of another language. In my personal experiences, I have found great success working with my ESL students with visual representations for learning. I have seen great gains in testing and observation when these particular students have the ability to attach text that isn’t their primary language to an image to help them understand. Not only is learning through images good for them, but it also will benefit all learners.
In a world that is advancing in technology very fast, many of our resources in the day-to-day world involve images to deliver content. Television, the Internet, software such as PowerPoint and iMovies, video simulations, and many other things out there today are the resources our students use on a daily basis. They relate to these things like they are second nature, so we should take advantage of that in our classrooms. Students will always have more digital media exposed to them on a daily basis as technology continues to grow. As a teacher, I think that we need to adapt and understand that our students learn in a different way than we once did. We had to create images in our minds from the texts we read in school. Now, they have the ability to already have the image to utilize and make a connection to their prior knowledge. The more we expose our students to visual literacy, the more we will enhance their learning.

Until next time,
Annette