6 Tips for Effectively Teaching Visual Literacy
Visual literacy activities are exercises where your artists can practice and develop their ability to look at images or objects and more fully describe what they see as well as begin to interpret the meaning of what they’re seeing.
Here are some ways in which you can encourage this development when engaging in a visual literacy activity:
1. Teach them to observe vs. to see.
A student once told me that the difference between seeing and observing is that with the latter, “you have to spend time to examine what you’re looking at.” It’s the difference between walking past a piece of artwork in a museum as you glance at it and stopping in front of it to study it. We want to teach our students to observe the world around them closely because this is the only way they’ll be able to analyze what they’re seeing.
2. Be direct.
Tell students outright that you want them to spend about a minute just looking at the materials you’ve taken out, before you talk about them.
3. Guide them.
While you give them “observation time”, tell them to start at one spot and let their eyes take a trip all around the image or objects. Slow down their pace with the tone of your voice.
4. Inspire them.
Ask them rhetorical questions to consider without answering them out loud. You can tell them that after they’ve looked, they can raise their hands. Ask them: What materials do you see? What types of colors are on this board? How could we use these tools?
5. Ask them the right questions in the right way.
The way that teachers pose questions can either inspire us to share what we think or know or intimidate us to try to seek out the correct answer or copy what others have said. Here are some tips when asking questions:
Use open ended questions that have more than one answer. And ask one question multiple ways so that you give thinking time to students.
Be clear about your expectations. After you ask your questions, tell them you’re looking for multiple responses and ideas from all of them.
Avoid pointing. Students will rely on pointing to the object they’re talking about and this will hinder them using descriptive language. Make it clear that they shouldn’t point what they’re describing. You can make it a game in the sense that the other students can try and guess which object the student is talking about.
6. Reinforce descriptive language and support language acquisition.
When you get a response, ask guiding follow up questions, provide scaffolding, and reiterate the final response as a tool for modeling.