Visual Literacy for the Enhancement of Inclusive Teaching

Visual literacy can be a mystery to students, and to faculty who specialize in traditionally non-visual material. Yet it can inform and strengthen an inclusive critique of many aspects of contemporary and past cultures. As our world becomes more visually expressive and persuasive (for example in advertising, video games, film, web site construction, travel brochures, newspaper inserts, photography, billboards, text books, corporate logos, etc.), there is a need for all of us to develop greater visual analysis skills for the enhancement of inclusive teaching as well as an understanding of the visual culture around us. The contemporary academic field of visual communication is complex. It addresses tools for visual analysis and wider issues such as ethics in visual media, aesthetics, visual literacy theory, reception (audience) theory, and issues of visual representation, to name a few. It addresses content as well as visual construction, and all of their implications. A volume such as Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods and Media, edited by Smith, Moriarty, Barbatsis and Kenney (2005) presents many of the primary research areas in the field, and is a good place to start an education in visual media communication. Historically, visual analysis skills, which ferret out the character and implications of visual construction in an image, have served art historians and connoisseurs for centuries. Yet many students without an introductory visual arts course are prey to "art anxiety," a phenomenon that can undermine confidence when beginning to deconstruct visual images of any kind. Since traditional and original art is purchasable primarily by the wealthy, there is an assumption made by many that only the wealthy can intelligently and suitably interpret those images. While students often do feel more secure when analyzing contemporary print advertisements, my experience with student art anxiety compels me to trace the derivation of visual construction devices to examples in painting history so that I can diminish (in theory) the anxiety associated with any sort of visual analysis. In 2010 we must accommodate not just still images like photographs and other flat media, along with paintings and prints, but moving images as well. In addition, James Elkins argues in his books Visual Literacy (2007) and How to Use Your Eyes (2008) that visual literacy should take into account such a wide array of images as Chinese and Japanese script, scientific diagrams, a mandala, or an Egyptian scarab. The tools and knowledge required for this breadth of analysis are daunting, yet beginning with still images in a narrow slice of print advertising is a good place to begin building skills. Print advertising can appear as a ritualistic reconstruction of contemporary social power relations, foregrounding issues of gender, race, class, religion, among others, as well as undermine the present claim that we live in a "post-racial" society. I prompt students with a series of questions about a number of visual tools that can enhance critical viewing, beginning with the most easy to interpret. Students usually respond enthusiastically, pleased to interpret familiar cultural material and challenged to solve visual puzzles that lend themselves to rather easy solution. Various visual devices, at the service of artists for centuries, can situate products and clothing models in relation to current social rituals. These can be devices that organize any flat visual field, for example, a postage stamp, an advertisement for cigarettes, a corporate letterhead, or a painting. My focus when teaching non-art students is on the mundane and ubiquitous fashion ads in newspapers, mailers sent to homes, and in newspaper inserts, sent by corporate entities such as J. C. Penney, Macy's, the Gap, Old Navy and Nordstrom. These are not the most innovative or popular of contemporary print advertisements, but conceivably among the most viewed by the public, and therefore of interest, at least, for their pervasiveness. …