Tania Sheko on Visual Literacy

Posted on | October 1, 2008 | 11 Comments

Commenting on my post on Literacy, Postliteracy, Modes of Expression, Tania Sheko, a teacher librarian in Victoria, Australia, has written a thoughtful comment that deserves its own space here:

“…….I was discussing visual literacies with my 18 year-old son who is completing his final year at school , and he said that he asked his English teacher if they could study film as well as text, and she replied no. The reasons she gave are interesting. She said that, the weaker students were less likely to be able to critically evaluate film. They would just sit back and switch off, then just recap the story rather than use any higher order skills. Doesn’t this say that visual literacies are complex and need to be taught as early as possible, that teaching should scaffold these literacies, and even that different genres, such as film, should be used more often for discussion and written response? I know students who struggle to read between the lines and make inferences while watching films, or even reading comics. This can be very debilitating in life; it doesn”t boost self-confidence when you’re the one who doesn”t know what’ going on while others are laughing about some kind of irony. This is not even touching on the learning that would occur if students create the film themselves.”

The passive nature of television viewing has, indeed, bred generations of viewers who ’switch off’ whenever the machine is switched on. The question is, will this change in an age in which we can create video easily and cheaply – will an active and creative relationship to video begin to nurture a different, perhaps more critical, approach to TV viewing too? Is this change already apparent? And, of course, how will formal education meet this change, if at all?

Tania maintains a very readable blog called Brave New World.

Technorati Tags: tania sheko, visual literacy, television, video

Category: creativity, education, media

Comments

11 Responses to “Tania Sheko on Visual Literacy”

Tania Sheko
October 1st, 2008 @ 11:19 pm

Thankyou for the enormous compliment and generous plug, John. I do think that visually based genres, such as film, and even graphic novels, should be reviewed with fresh eyes. They can be so much more than easily digestible visual entertainment. In the same way, some educators are beginning to realise the enormous potential for discussion and analysis of recent picture books (which should be renamed). For example, Shaun Tan’s ‘The arrival’ is a visual masterpiece of multilayered possibilities for interpretation and inspiration.
Joe Nutt
October 4th, 2008 @ 7:58 pm

John & Tania,
I am still completely unconvinced by the entire visual literacy argument. Having been fortunate enough to have studied both literature and film for different postgraduate degrees, my experience of the latter academic discipline was ultimately hugely disappointing. I have never forgotten the point at which I really understood that film studies was a largely unrewarding and shallow intellectual pursuit. I had studiously read everything recommended and more by Lacan, Bazan, Lyotard and dozens of others but it was when I came across this gem by Christian Metz, “Desire is the desire for desire” that I had the epiphany.

The danger here is that film is actually a highly conservative and conventional art form, riddled with conventions. How many original films scripts are actually produced? A miniscule proportion of the total wherever you look in the industry, and when they are, like the work of Eric Rohmer, they are trashed by popular film critics who find them dull and incomprehensible.

Because of its highly conventional nature, it is very easy to mistake children’ ability to understand film readily, as in some way representative of higher order thinking. It isn”t. They have learnt the conventions at a very early age, especially through TV, and have an intuitive, not an objective understanding of the medium. I”ve tested this for myself in the classroom on many occasions.
Tania Sheko
October 5th, 2008 @ 6:18 am

Joe, I’m going to think about this, and probably post something on my blog in the near future, but it will begin with a focus on the UNESCO definition of literacy

‘Literacy links with the broad spectrum of communication practices in society and can only be addressed alongside other media, such as radio, T V, computers, mobile phone texting, visual images, etc. The massive development of electronic communication has not replaced paper-based literacy, but provides a new context for it; graphics have an increasing place alongside text; computer-based learning and play occupy both children and adults and displace the reading of books- all these phenomena are changing the way we view literacy’.

From Literacy: a UNESCO perspective
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001318/131817eo.pdf
John Connell
October 5th, 2008 @ 10:42 am

Joe,

I can’t decide whether you are unconvinced or inconvincible.
Clay Burell
October 5th, 2008 @ 11:58 am

I realize this “visual literacy” discussion is framed in terms of film/movies, but as I watch the broadcast news coverage of the US presidential campaign, I have to vote for enlarging this conceptualization of visual literacy. That so much of what is to me transparent demagoguery and propaganda is opaque to a wide percentage of the electorate screams for the rising generation of voters to be able to “read” broadcast media.

Students need to learn such “reading” skills as questioning who the talking heads and expert guests are, what their professional and personal histories suggest about their slant; who owns the media company in question; on and on.

Call it “media literacy” if you will, but it deserves a place somewhere in our young’s education. Given the choice between a voter who knows “onomatopoeia” and one who knows how not to be snowed by the tube, I’ll choose the latter any day.
Ron Burnett
October 6th, 2008 @ 3:43 am

This is such an important discussion. The relationship between various forms of literacy and the emergence of new media, some of which shift creativity from viewing to making, suggests that learners have a whole variety of tools available to them for self-expression. The question is not whether this compares to literacy in the old sense of the word, but whether new and more hybrid forms of reading, viewing and interacting are converging around creativity. Most students are great auto-didactics, quite capable of learning about something if they are interested. There may be a link here between learning informally and new forms of expression and literacy. At a minimum, there needs to be an acknowledgment that “writing” and “reading” may no longer be as conventional as they have been in the past. In that sense, literacy may not be the best term to describe a variety of activities of communication and learning.
Joe Nutt
October 6th, 2008 @ 1:55 pm

Ron and John,
I think Ron’ is an extremely precise and lucid description of the current position (and I hope I never become inconvincible!) The more I look into this, the more I suspect my problem with visual literacy as an educational concept is largely because I start from a very different position from teachers today. When I was an English teacher, I would never have dreamed of teaching English as a subject without covering both film, and advertising as significant forms of communication. One reason I decided to take an additional degree in Film Studies twenty five years ago was to make sure I learned more about visual techniques of communication. I suspect many teachers coming through the teacher training system today have been so force fed on a national curriculum, they have a much more limited sense of their subject’ boundaries than I had when I trained.

At the same time, I also think there is a tendency to equate students’ productions, with creativity, when they are not at all the same things. The former is practical and with most teenagers merely a matter of mimicking things they admire. I’m afraid (dare I say it, even very afraid) it is also usually what techno-zealots showcase because they haven”t bothered to really assess the work since they are more excited by the technology used to produce it, than in in the quality of what was produced. The latter is actually rare and distinguished by flashes of originality and at best, striking artistry. Ask yourself for example, how often have you seen art work on display in a school which genuinely matches those last criteria?
Doug Belshaw
October 6th, 2008 @ 9:32 pm

I’m writing my Ed.D. thesis on the concept of ‘digital literacies’ – thesis proposal here: http://digitalliteracies.edublogs.org (when Edublogs is working!)
Joe Wilson
October 6th, 2008 @ 10:29 pm

I taught English in school system, communications and media in College system and now work for national qualifcations authority looking after the vocational bit.

Too many of our learners are pre-literate in any of these fields. They trust any source put in front of them.
In one reform of exam system here there was a media option within Higher English and weaker Scottish learners would do just the same – retell the story. They were interested in subject area and liked soap operas or whatvever they needed to analyse – but they found it hard to be analytic.

I do think you need to understand onomatopoia , aliteration, metaphor , simile etc if you are really going to deconstruct media.

People are actually very naturally visually literate – most of us only started reading in last three centuries – but it is a discipline – and people do need to know the tricks the media play.
I’ll take my lab coat off now.
Tania Sheko
October 7th, 2008 @ 1:51 am

Joe,
I’ve taught students who struggle with visual literacy, whether it be making sense of sequence, understanding tone or making inferences. These are students between the ages of 12 and 18. The same students might also find the same challenges in written text. As a teacher, I can see that higher order skills need to be scaffolded in any genre.
Debating Literacy: pulling some threads together : John Connell: The Blog
September 10th, 2009 @ 7:22 pm

[...] Joe Nutt liked Ron’s ‘… extremely precise and lucid description of the current position’ and commented further: [...]