Teach Visual Literacy Skills to Help Kids Succeed

Today’s readers need increasingly sophisticated visual literacy skills. To help students develop the ability to interpret images, teachers can build literacy skills through a simple activity with four steps: observe, interpret, evaluate, create.

Visual Literacy Skills

Visual literacy skills refer to the ability to interpret and understand information presented visually; that is, in the form of visual elements. Visual elements might include images, symbols, colors, shapes, maps, charts, and graphs, to name a few.

Visual literacy skills are becoming increasingly important for all of us today, in an environment in which visual elements play a major role in communication. Today, more than ever, young readers are being asked to develop sophisticated visual literacy skills. Advertisements, graphic novels, online memes, political cartoons, maps, DIY instructions, and more, all require the ability to interpret images. This importance has implications for students in your classroom. Visual literacy skills are essential for students to succeed in the classroom and beyond, personally, and professionally.

The Need for Sophisticated Visual Literacy Skills

I write this article from the perspective of my role as an editor. An editor’s job may seem to be all about the words on the page—and paying attention to the text is certainly enough to keep us busy! But the work of an editor extends beyond the text. Our real job is to ensure the author’s meaning is clear. This, of course, includes making the text concise, accurate, and thoughtful, but it also includes looking at the design of the book.

When I review a book in production, I ask myself a series of questions that include:

• Do the headers guide the reader?
• Are the most important pieces of text easy to find?
• Do the captions detract from the body text? Or do they get lost?
• Are all the illustrations accurate?
• Is there another perspective that would help readers better understand a complex idea?
• Would an infographic work here or is a simple table or pie chart better suited to this concept?

Demands on the Reader

Editors pay attention to these visual elements because readers do, too.

In the early grades, illustrations and photographs support reading comprehension. As an editor, I review all our images to make sure they align with the text and clarify difficult vocabulary. As readers become more fluent with text, books should include a variety of images, including charts, graphs, and maps. Each image requires students to observe, interpret, and evaluate visual information.

An Activity to Build Visual Literacy Skills

To build visual literacy skills with your students, try this simple activity. Choose a cartoon to use with your students for this activity.

Observe

Have students study a cartoon for one minute. Then, record students’ answers to the following questions:

• What objects or people do you see in the image?
• What text is included in the cartoon?

Interpret

As a class, consider the following:

• How does the image relate to the text?
• Why do you think the artist paired this image with this text?
• How would the meaning change if the artist wrote a different caption?
• Are any of the images symbols? Why do you think the artist chose to use these images?
• Which images in the cartoon appear to be most significant? What do you see that makes you say that?
• What’s the artist’s purpose: to analyze an idea, persuade readers, express his feelings, or entertain readers?

Evaluate

Ask students:

• What is the significance of this cartoon?
• What effect does it have on readers?

Create

Whether it’s a poem or a wall of graffiti, the best art inspires us to respond, so encourage your students to respond to this cartoon. Ask, “What would you like to tell the artist of this cartoon?” Encourage students to draw their response, including friends, family members, and famous faces in their own cartoons.

Visual literacy skills are essential for today’s students. This means teachers must be visual teachers and explicitly build these skills with students. This visual literacy skill building activity can be adapted and reused again and again with students of all ages to support teachers in this goal.