After reading the article, I reflected on how visual literacy applies in my learning. As art majors, we are naturally trained in visual literacy through close-looking exercises and verbalizing the significance of visuals in art history. But since I am also an English major—a major that you would think deals mainly with textual information— I thought about the ways that visual literacy has found a place there as well. I find that visual literacy plays an equally important role in both of my majors; often in my English classes, I am asked to interpret visual images and write about them or find symbols in images just like we would find symbols in writing. It just shows how visual, textual, and verbal communication all work together, whether we recognize it or not.
It’s funny (but also weirdly coincidental) because in both my Renaissance Literature class and this Digital Art class, Hieronymus Bosch paintings were used in visual exercises, and in my English class we were expected to verbally communicate certain associations with the image. I think this just shows how important visual literacy is because it can be useful in different contexts and for different purposes.
The article was written in 2009, and since then our technology has become even more integrated into our learning and in our daily lives. Speaking from my experience, I believe visual literacy has found a place in education, and the article is right in the expectations that are held in students today, and how some level of visual literacy has become essential to being successful in communicating in the modern world. Even with classes that aren’t in the arts and humanities, students are still asked to think creatively and use technology to communicate visually through things like presentations and charts.
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