Activities involving photographs stimulate visual perceptual awareness. Children understand visual stimuli before having verbal capacity to deal with the world. Vision becomes the primary means for learning, understanding, and adjusting to the environment. Photography can provide an effective avenue to visual literacy. (Author)

Three conceptual frameworks for examining the cognitive response to film are reviewed. It is suggested that a phenomenological rather than atomistic conception of the film-viewer interaction will be most useful for the generation of further studies in this area. (Author/RM)

The revolution brought about by computerized technology, in general, and television imagery, in particular, challenges the perceptual habits and alters the television viewer's means of expressing appreciation of the aesthetic merits of such television images. This study speculates on several perceptual and aesthetic drawbacks of future massive…

Discusses a public library film literacy program offered to adolescents and young adults which incorporates films that are not curriculum-oriented and center around specific themes such as self-identity, creativity, speculations, and lifestyles. Seven films selected for program on social issues and viewers' evaluations are highlighted.…

This paper is a report on a decade of teaching visual literacy at the American University (Washington, D.C.). Visual literacy is defined as an awareness that comes with appropriate development of basic visual and aural competencies. The 15 reasons for studying visual literacy are perception, drawing, expression, brain awareness, design elements,…

Visual criticism is a major component of the new visual communication. Visual communication has changed through the advent of new technology which allows images to be combined and manipulated with relative ease. Visual criticism analyzes the forms and practices of image production and examines the roles of images in society creating a new dialogue…

As the viewer watches the opening credits for the program "Entertainment Tonight," the screen comes to life with rotating shapes and spinning geometric patterns. One has the sense of travelling on an imaginary voyage through space. Many of the computer generated displays common now on television use such visual devices as linear perspective,…

Employs the metaphor of verbal language to explore the elements which make up the alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary of visual language, with special emphasis on medical illustrations. Form, line, mass, the role of light, perspective, and visual perception are discussed; nine figures and five references are included. (JL)

Visual learning, the capacity to construe meaning from visual images and to create meaningful visual forms, distills complex information and presents information directly. It plays an important role in development of the ability to abstract and decode. (SK)

Not convinced that teachers and teacher-librarians were actively suppressing their students' visual literacy, the author decided to conduct informal interviews with four local teacher-librarians (three elementary and one secondary) attending classes at the university where he instructs. All four indicated that though their libraries were rich…

This 535-page document includes more than 60 papers presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the Visual Literacy Association. Topics cover a wide range of visual literacy interests: computer generated graphics, message design, desktop publishing, photography, critical viewing skills, memory enhancement, and the development of visual…

This study reviews historical thinking about visual literacy, addresses the issue of setting visual literacy's parameters, and provides a philosophy to link individual theories in this multidisciplinary movement. The report examines the roots of the visual literacy movement and the seminal literature in the field. It includes a categorizing of…

Visual literacy contains a vat of underlying understanding that fuses to the bones of students who actively pursue an art education. For everything visible, there is an invisible internal counterpart, and arts education provides vital depth that is currently being drained from Canadian culture. Visual literacy begins with the elements and…

The act of composition is based on perception, selection, and arrangement in time and space of what is seen. How the world is seen depends on experience, memory, sensibility, discriminative powers, sexual identity, and cultural and historical contexts. Students can learn to understand how their personality affects what they see by maintaining…

Experimental phenomenology requires that educators acknowledge the experiences of the learner. Today, many of those experiences are images that come from television. In a behaviorist or humanist tradition, learning takes place through experience, and learners comprehend, make decisions, and analyze their behavior through reflection. Meaning is…