Visual literacy Standards for Higher Education

How to integrate Visual Literacy to Enhance Learning

                                   Taken from Hattwig, D., Burgess, J., Medaille, A? Visual Literacy Competency Standards  for Higher Education. Association of College and Research Libraries. 2011

We are surrounded by visual information and it is imperative to incorporate it in our daily teaching. Our students have been bombarded constantly with images, videos, movies and we cannot exclude it in our classrooms. 

Its important to reinforce 
learning using images

I think the essential skill that represent my strength in order to engage in a visual oriented society would be in  integrating images in my daily teaching, I constantly try to reinforce what I teach either with powerpoints, where I balance the text with the images, posting images related to the topic all around the class, so if a students comes into my class, the setting “talks” about what we are learning. It can be either students`work, posters, photos… Maybe because I was taught in a very “austere” environment, I try to make it visually friendly to my students. We cannot take for granted that students learn only by hearing, we need to consider the multiple intelligence, so reinforcing learning with images should be even more frequent in my classes.

Classroom surrounded with visual information 
about what is taught

                                                                                               In the other hand, I am not an artistic person, for me it is even difficult to create stick figures, I do not have a good sense of perspective, three dimension... so I almost never draw for myself, even less for my students. Some times I encourage them to draw what they are learning and I got amazed of what they can do, it is also a way for us teachers to have a better sense of how students perceive-process-express what they are learning but, again, I admit this is a handicap that I need to work on it, and not only because it is not my strength I should leave it aside.

Working as a teacher is always a collaborative work, for sure we spend hours isolated in our rooms with our students, but for making lesson plans rubrics, common assessments, sharing best practices, working with peers is essential. Now, if it comes to implementing strategies for building lessons that involves visual literacy, for me it would be a must to work with peers as I do not master this, I need feedback from my peers, I need to hear experiences from others, I would love to know more innovating ideas in this matter. It would be great to work collaboratively in this masters’ class so we learn how to integrate visual literacy in our classrooms and then we can expand our own lesson, we can adapt and modify them, enrich them and then the rubrics as well.

Also I think it would be very important to work with librarians. In the MS  library the have a lot of visual materials and I am confident they can orient us in how to use them and also, in learning how to “quote” them and give credit to their source, as they teach our students in how to do that with internet and book sources.