The most common tools individuals use to articulate complex and abstract concepts are writing and spoken language, long privileged as primary forms of communication. However, our, explanations of these concepts may be more aptly communicated through visual means, such as drawings. Interpreting and analyzing abstract graphic representations is…

Some educators may view diagrams, pictures, and charts as nice add-on tools for students who are visual thinkers. But Steve Moline sees visual literacy as fundamental to learning and to what it means to be human. In Moline's view, we are all bilingual. Our second language, which we do not speak but which we read and write every day, is visual.…

Presents a checklist which can be used in the development of materials and activities to develop visual abilities; and includes a visual preference survey designed to provide data needed in responding to some of the checklist items, especially those related to learner abilities and preferences. (CMV)

Visual sequences should be the first visual literacy exercises for reasons that are physio-psychological, semantic, and curricular. In infancy, vision is undifferentiated and undetailed. The number of details a child sees increases with age. Therefore, a series of pictures, rather than one photograph which tells a whole story, is more appropriate…

This paper relates visual literacy to the historical development of art education in the United States, emphasizing the work of Walter Smith, an art educator, during the later nineteenth century. The visual mode of learning, especially drawing, in public schools has been justified as a means to furthering industrialization and as an end in itself,…

To explore methods of visual communication as a supplement to bilingual education, 200 white male subjects were selected from a public school system in South Florida (100 from the first grade and 100 from the eighth grade) and were allowed to create visual statements from a standardized set of photos. Using primarily Latent Partition Analysis, the…

The first part of this address given at the second annual Reading Conference (Montclair, December 1971) offers alternative answers to the question, "In this age of multi-sensory media from which we can learn of the past, the present, and the future in other ways than the written word, must everyone learn to read?" Data from recent research reports…

For the past 100 years we have been acting as if education in school was of words, by words, and for words, but in fact verbal literacy was preceded by visual literacy when humans communicated with body language before they had speech. American educators have been concentrating efforts on the left hemisphere of the brain in which the verbal…