Wherever you look, you are surrounded by a plethora of visual content and images. From advertisements and social media to art and instructional materials, images play a significant role in how we communicate, learn and understand the world around us. Therefore, the ability to interpret these visuals – known as visual literacy – is an essential skill that will be critical in both today’s society and the future. However, despite its importance, visual literacy is often overlooked in teaching and learning, in part due to art education having been marginalised over the years.
The current English national curriculum for art and design has historically been criticised for its lack of depth and guidance. The curriculum, which has remained largely unchanged since 2013, consists of just two pages of nominal guidance, reflecting a broader trend of devaluing arts education in favour of STEM subjects. Many teachers complain that it is not aspirational enough, or does not give enough guidance, whereas others have embraced its simplicity as enabling freedom for them to interpret it in their own way.
However, with that freedom comes the assumption that all teachers understand how such skills can be both taught and learned, which isn’t always the case. This, combined with other sector challenges involving a lack of subject-specific teachers at primary, plus budget constraints for resources and training, often leads to inconsistency and infrequency of art lessons.
With a new Labour government, it feels the tide is slowly but surely turning and bringing with it an emphasis on the importance of arts and cultural education and how these subjects support a well-rounded education that fosters creativity and innovation. While several commitments have been made, including a curriculum and assessment review (which is already underway), these broader reforms aren’t art-specific, nor will the changes happen overnight. Therefore, it’s important that until visual literacy is confirmed as a core pillar of primary education, schools and teachers feel supported to bridge any existing knowledge, confidence and resource gaps.
What is visual literacy?
At its most basic, visual literacy can be interpreted as an ability to ‘read’, ‘write’ and ‘create’ images. It's a skill that allows us to interpret, negotiate and make meaning from a whole range of images. This doesn’t just apply to traditional art forms; it extends to digital media, photographs, social media posts and even emojis. Visual literacy involves understanding the messages conveyed through these images and how this can evoke certain emotions and influence our perceptions. The key components of visual literacy include:
- Interpretation: Grasping the content and context of an image and understanding the story behind it, whether it's a historical painting or a meme.
- Analysis: Delving deeper into the components and structures of visual media to understand and appreciate the finer details, and questioning what makes it captivating and what elements are at play.
- Evaluation: Assessing the effectiveness and impact of visual communication to help evaluate and discern the quality and purpose of the visual materials and imagery, considering how compelling it is and whether it conveys data or messaging.
- Creation: Self-producing meaningful visual content and taking inspiration from others to help spark creativity and innovation. From designing a logo to creating an engaging presentation slide, this ability is invaluable for all kinds of scenarios.
- Engagement: Interacting with visual media and images through a critical lens and reflective manner, considering their broader implications and contexts.
Visual literacy empowers individuals to decode complex visual messages and communicate their feelings and ideas effectively. It’s not just about appreciating art and imagery; it’s about being able to navigate and make sense of the world around us.
Why is it so important?
In a world saturated with visual information, the ability to understand and create visual content is crucial for several reasons.
Firstly, in an educational context, visual aids help enhance learning and retention by making information more accessible and memorable. Pupils who are visually literate can better understand and retain information, which can support learning across all subjects. It can offer pupils a wide range of skills essential to their development, including critical viewing, visual reasoning, visual discrimination, visual thinking, visual association and visual reconstruction. All these skills are valuable not only in the arts but also in more traditionally ‘in-demand’ subjects like science, mathematics and technology, where visual representations are often used to explain complex concepts.
Visual literacy also encourages communication. However, this isn’t just the ability to verbally discuss and share thoughts and feelings, but to communicate visually through creation and design. This empowers creativity in the classroom and is also key to developing and sustaining skillsets in careers including marketing, architecture, technology and more. Being visually literate can give you an edge that not everyone has.
When considering daily life, visual literacy is a useful skill; from assembling furniture with illustrated instructions to discerning the authenticity of social media images, the ability to interpret, analyse and evaluate is key, particularly when navigating today’s digital world.
Beyond this, visual literacy has the ability to build emotional and social understanding – helping individuals interpret visual cues in social interactions enhances empathy. It also allows for self-expression through art, which is crucial for emotional wellbeing, as studies show that engaging with visual art can reduce stress and anxiety.
Introducing visual literacy in the classroom
At Art UK, we believe that art can be a pathway to becoming visually literate and honing essential skills so that children develop critical thinking, effective communication and cultural understanding. The visual literacy skills taught in the classroom will become crucial for lifelong learning, so how do we as educators champion this?
The concept itself might seem abstract and daunting, but visual literacy can be transformative for teaching and learning. A useful first step is looking around and seeing what materials are readily available. There are many free resources out there that come with lesson materials, often developed by teachers, giving you the peace of mind to effectively and easily implement them into lesson planning and delivery.
One example is Art UK’s upcoming Visual Literacy Week from 30 September to 6 October 2024, which is dedicated to helping educators foster a national dialogue around arts education. Throughout the week, teachers will have access to a variety of activities, including Art UK’s ‘Art Adventure’, which takes children on a virtual school trip to two art galleries, allowing them to see exciting artworks first-hand and interpret, analyse and discuss what they see before being invited to create their own art. The trip provides teachers with an introduction to the world of visual literacy and equips them with all the materials and instructions needed for children to take part.
Alongside this, Art UK’s Superpower of Looking programme offers free teaching resources to help pupils gain an essential superpower: the ability to really 'see' – to critically observe, analyse, question, interpret and empathise. It comes with the tools, guidance and confidence to deliver engaging lessons in a way that resonates with children, getting them to use their ‘superpower’ of looking.
Teachers can also look to other cultural institutions or organisations as a way to elevate teaching and learning. This includes visiting museums, galleries, or other local attractions to inspire discussion, build greater cultural capital and develop pupils’ visual literacy skills in authentic contexts.
Whether in person or online, looking at art helps us question what we see (challenging us to avoid making assumptions), make connections (evoking certain feelings or memories) and appreciate individual views (sharing how every person will bring their own individual take on what they see or notice). All of this can help teach children valuable life lessons they can take into adulthood, including challenging attitudes, stereotypes and personal prejudice.
Beyond this, teachers can integrate visual literacy and analysis across other subjects. For example, rather than asking pupils to read a story or a textbook, ask them to look at the pictures and illustrations to help them ‘see’ the story or narrative. This will help them understand the words on the page – particularly for subjects like science and history, which can sometimes be more challenging. The same can be said for English lessons for children whose first language may not be English. It opens access to lessons, as it allows every child to use the imagery, diagrams, infographics or pictures as an initial basis for sparking discussion, which builds towards further evaluation and understanding.
Implementing a more dialogic approach to lessons can also be an effective way of engaging pupils and promoting greater communication and critical thinking skills. This approach focuses on the teacher guiding and facilitating discussions and debate. It encourages pupils to express and share ideas via interpretation and reasoning rather than simply listening and responding.
Presenting pupils with an image or piece of artwork and asking them to explore without structured instruction will help them develop greater curiosity and learn to respect a variety of interpretations. Teachers can encourage conversation and guide debate within the classroom through open-ended questions and prompts, but the onus is on the pupils to share ideas, debate and ask questions. This facilitation helps pupils more actively participate in their learning, developing critical visual literacy skills which help them observe, question, interpret and communicate with confidence.
Allowing pupils to create their own visual content in lessons – whether through drawing, photography or digital media – will encourage creative expression and give them the opportunity to express their ideas and learn through doing. This hands-on approach is particularly effective in helping pupils internalise visual literacy concepts and come up with designs and creations that they can then introduce and share with the class.
These activities can be as simple as using arts and crafts available within the classroom, encouraging pupils to think outside the box and get creative. They might also incorporate technology and digital tools as a means of coming up with creative solutions that address real-world problems, helping to make learning relevant to pupils’ lives and purposeful in the context of wider society.
Making it happen
Looking at and exploring art teaches us to see the world from other perspectives, to become discerning and to read visual information in a meaningful and purposeful way. This has never been more vital in today's world, where images and visual media dominate communication, learning and even social interactions. It is particularly important to introduce visual literacy from a young age, as this is where language acquisition happens and the rules of speaking and writing are learned, from making marks and learning to draw to writing letters, developing language and understanding text-based learning.
For children, the ability to interpret and create visual content is not just an artistic skill but a fundamental part of understanding the world around them. Visual literacy enhances critical thinking, allowing children to analyse and question the information presented to them, whether it's through advertisements, social media or educational materials.
What’s more, as digital technology continues to integrate into every aspect of life, the ability to navigate and make sense of visual information becomes as important as traditional literacy. Schools should therefore implement visual literacy within lessons to equip pupils with the tools they need to navigate and contribute to the world around them with confidence and creativity, fostering not only academic success but also emotional intelligence and social awareness.
Katie Leonard is Head of Learning at Art UK.