Partnership between industry and education is important in establishing programs in visual literacy. The field is likely to become better established as the result of the formation of the Conference on Visual Literacy as a permanent group. However, as yet very little is known concretely about research and demonstration on this subject. Green…

Reviews historical thinking about visual literacy; addresses the issue of setting visual literacy's parameters; provides a rationale linking individuals in an otherwise multidisciplinary movement; proposes a redefinition of visual literacy; and postulates proposals designed to foster further development and understanding of the theoretical…

A model is proposed that organizes factors related to visual function into three dimensions: visual abilities, available resources and past experiences, and environmental cues. The model is explained to be useful in determining how to elicit visual behaviors or maximize visual function in persons with low vision. (Author/CL)

Discusses the difficulties directors face when trying to capture Shakespeare's plays on film, citing Polanski's "Macbeth," Brook's "Lear," and Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" as examples. (RB)

Description of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, and the philosophy of director Nathan Lyons. (SP)

Suggests that verbal and visual literacy are interdependent and that English departments should take on the task of heightening visual literacy. (AEA)

Discusses the effect television has on youth in making them visually literate and how educators should use this information to make education more effective. (CHC)

Analysis did not show significant differences between watching one or two sound films with regard to information retention. (KS)

Like other literacies (textual literacy, numeracy), digital visual literacy (DVL) is the ability both to create and to understand certain types of information, in this case visual materials created with a computer. DVL is now essential in many daily life and workplace tasks, from looking critically at newspaper images or TV evening news to using a…

With business documents, visuals can serve to enhance the written word in conveying the message. Images can be especially effective when used subtly, on part of the page, on successive pages to provide continuity, or even set as watermarks over the entire page. A main reason given for traditional text-only business documents is that they are…

Traditional literacy practices and educational policymakers define reading as a process of vocabulary recognition and print-based decoding. This perspective is especially prevalent in the primary-grade literacy classroom. Yet, a growing movement sees literacy encompassing not only printed text, but a wide range of cultural, technological, and…

Anne Burke and Shelley Stagg Peterson argue that "picture books offer a medium for teaching visual and critical literacy across the curriculum." To support this idea, they describe a multidisciplinary unit on World War II that pushes high school students to utilize visual and print literacies to analyze, comprehend, and relate to public events and…

This paper reviews two studies of color preference and the relationships between color and legibility. The Gustin study in 1991 dealt with the legibility of and preference for projected slides with colored backgrounds and white text. The order of background color preference was cyan, blue, green, yellow, magenta, and red. The follow-up study by…

One possible explanation of the differences between blind and sighted persons (McKinney, 1964; Attneave & Benson, 1969; Warren, 1970) is that vision is the primary spatial reference, and inputs from other modalities are fitted to a visual map. Several criticisms of this theory are adduced. (Editor/RK)