Three Baby-step Visual Literacy Concepts for ELA Teaching

I was once in a digital literacies class, and a middle school Language Arts teacher proudly told me that, when she assigns a project that includes art, she only grades on the quality of the writing, and she never grades on the quality of the art. So, for example, if she asked her students to make comics summarizing a book chapter, those students would only be graded on the words in the comics.

I was kind of flabbergasted.

Her arguments, she told me, were:

1. She taught Language Arts, not art.
2. It wasn't fair to give a poor artist a bad grade in Language Arts class just because the assignment included art.
3. She didn't know enough about art to include how to do art in her instruction.

I continued to be flabbergasted, but other people at the table nodded their heads and agreed with her. You might agree with her.

I didn't. Here are my arguments back:

1. People don't just read letters and numbers. Yes. Books, short stories, poems, and other texts that only have letters and numbers can be amazing, and they are very much the currency of the ELA classroom. But in isolation, they are increasingly more rare. Because internet. If all my students are going to be spending most of their time reading things that interact with more than letters and numbers, then I have a responsibility to teach to the reality of their literacy landscape (or, for shorthand, New London Group, 1996).
2. When considering meaning, everything is interrelated. If a student's pictures don't convey a meaning to an audience, then why include pictures? Also, if I'm assigning art, what is the message I'm sending if I'm only grading the words? (or, for shorthand, Shanahan, 2013)
3. That can be hard. Thank goodness for partnering with art educators (or, for shorthand, Ohler, 2000).

Even if you're not ready to make a full jump to incorporating visual literacy instruction, here are three visual concepts that you might add into your current practices:

• Negative Space. This is an artistic concept that applies to both letters and numbers and images. When thinking about art, the negative space is the space that surrounds an object. When educators teach poetry, they often point out its importance. But, it's also an aspect of prose: without paragraphs, a piece of writing is an impenetrable wall of text. The ways that dialogue is punctuated creates negative space that evokes feelings in the reader. Asking students to consider the negative space in both their own and others' writing asks them to think about the visual impact of word placement.
• Color: Different colors evoke different feelings. Blues and greens are often calming, Reds, yellows, and oranges might create feelings of warmth. Or, depending how they're used, those same colors might indicate a warning. References to color in any text impact our understandings about the text's tone. Colors in the packaging of the text, be they the color of the cover, paper, end matter, screen, or font, also affect a text's tone. Attending to those factors in the works we read and write is another way to incorporate visual literacy.
• Shape: In the same way that colors evoke feelings, so do shapes. Angular shapes like triangles might feel sharp. Square shapes might feel grounded and solid. Bigger shapes might feel more important. Smaller shapes might feel less important. Consider asking students to discuss how they interpret references to shapes in a text, be they organic, like a description of a landscape, or built, like a description of a city. 

By the way, if you're interested in going beyond visual literacy baby-steps, check out Molly Bang's book, Picture This: How Pictures Work. Another great option is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

***

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.

Ohler, J. (2000, October). Art becomes the fourth R. Educational Leadership, 58(2), 16-19.

Shanahan, L. E. (2013). Multimodal representations: a fifth- grade teacher influences students’ design and production. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 8(2), 85-102.