Many children view favourite feature films repeatedly at home and develop understandings of them. This article discusses findings from a study which focused on the understandings that 9- and 10-year-old children showed about character in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." These findings are reported in terms of a framework…

Data visualizations are now commonplace in the public media. The ability to interpret and create such visualizations, as a form of data literacy, is increasingly important for democratic participation. Yet, the cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills needed to produce and use data visualizations and to develop data literacy are not fluidly…

This article presents a pilot interdisciplinary project for middle-school students including visual literacy, studio art, English-language literacy, geology and the study of indigenous groups. The location of the pilot was in the upper Midwest, along the Mississippi river bluffs of St. Paul, Minnesota. English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) students…

Cognitive research has shown that the human brain processes images quicker than it processes words, and images are more likely than text to remain in long-term memory. With the expansion of technology that allows people from all walks of life to create and share photographs with a few clicks, the world seems to value visual media more than ever…

Chemists and chemistry educators have long sought meaningful ways to visualize fundamentally abstract components, such as atoms and molecules, of their trade. As technology has improved, computer-based visualization methods have infused both research and education in chemistry. Biochemistry, in particular, has become highly dependent on ways that…

This study offers a discussion of the role of the visual in the professional training of geographers arguing that visual literacy is not necessarily promoted during geography undergraduate studies. It then analyzes an experience of teaching a visualized Latin America developed in Argentina, as an illustrative example: on the one hand, it reveals…

This article explains information architecture, focusing on comic arts' features for representing and structuring knowledge. Then it details information design theory and information behaviors relative to this format, also noting visual literacy. Next , applications of comic arts in education are listed. With this background, several research…

Visual literacy is an important skill for students to have in order to interpret embedded messages on signs and in advertisements successfully. As advertisements today tend to feature iconic people or events that shaped the modern world, it is crucial to develop students' visual literacy skills so they can comprehend the intended messages. This…

In this article, director of Educational Outreach at the Library of Congress Lee Ann Potter describes a classroom activity that focuses on an 1876 single-page circular published in Salem, Massachusetts about Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech. A. M. Bell's son, Alexander Graham Bell described "Visible Speech" as "a…

The multimodal world learners inhabit demands visual literacy among other literacies if learners are to effectively navigate its terrain. In this study, we sought to understand the extent to which five Grade 4 English textbooks currently used in some schools in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa facilitated the development of visual…

The "collegium" learning community teaches mid-career graduate students intentionally to prepare for and create learning opportunities for their undergraduate students, what the authors call "teaching on purpose." The design addresses the lack of alignment between research on learning and preparation of faculty for teaching,…

Visual literacy was a stated learning objective for the fall 2009 iteration of a first-year seminar course. To help students develop visual literacy skills, they received formal instruction throughout the semester and completed a series of carefully designed learning activities. The effects of these interventions were measured using a one-group…

As one might expect, visual literacy has particular necessity for the librarian who, like this author, works in a Visual Resources Center (VRC). Recently the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published its updated "Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education." These standards succinctly introduce visual…

This article adds to the small collection of art education studies on video games (Parks, 2008; Patton, 2013; Sweeny, 2010) by critically examining the association between violent video games, the U.S. military, and mental disability--from a critical disability studies perspective. Derby overviews the controversies surrounding violent video games…

Given the prevalence of multimodal texts in today's world, it is not surprising that adolescent literacies are as dynamic, multimodal and visual as the texts with which they interact. As Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996) have outlined, the multimodal texts that make up a large percentage of our world consist of a range of modes (auditory,…