Visual Literacy Enhances Education – Describe What You See

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House on a Lake by Michael Gerry
House on a Lake by Michael Gerry

Enhancing your own visual literacy will enhance your ongoing education. You may not be enrolled currently in a course or a degree program, but if you want to improve at your job—and anyone these days who wants to keep their job wants to improve at it—you will be interested in your own on-going education. In any case, if you love life you will likely be motivated to pursue on-going education, as studying various aspects of life is a great way to experience a love of life. You’ll want to be part of a learning community to increase the brilliancy of yourself and your team at work, whether you are employed for pay or as a student, including (but not limited to) settings in a college or university.

Considering the impact of increased visual literacy, for example enhancing the visual literacy of children will shift the way they learn and add a dimension to their perception. This aspect of education has huge implications for individuals, groups, and society as a whole and I will continue to explore these in this blog. There are resources to  help with this method of education.

Today I am focusing on the strengthening of verbal and descriptive skills that comes with this deepening of visual perception. And we will notice that in turn, with the enhancement of descriptive skills, we see more deeply, more perceptively. This leads to a spiraling in the increased development of verbal and visual skills.

The two forms of literacy—visual and verbal—enhance one another.

Apart from the evident relationship of this topic to multiple intelligence theory, the point of this blog is how useful it can be to a sighted person (someone who is not blind) to deepen their visual perception skills. This goes for people whose multiple intelligence strengths are chiefly in visual learning and whose strengths are lie chiefly in areas of intelligence other than visual.

So, how do we go about learning to see more perceptively in this way?  There are several ways.  Let’s explore one: interviewing about what we see.

In strengthening the verbal and visual-conceptual “muscles,” greater and sharper visual perception will come, and along with it the sharpening of the use of descriptive language. I invite you to look at this painting. When you look at this painting please respond to the questions below.  You can enter your answers here, below in a comment box if you wish, or just answer for yourself, privately. Try looking at the painting while doing nothing else (in other words, just looking and not multitasking) and respond to the questions as you do. The questions may draw you in to the painting further. Look at the painting and ask yourself these questions:

What do you see?

What did you notice first?

What would you say is happening here in the picture? What time of day is it?

What is the mood of the picture?

Do you see the small illumined bit of a neighbor’s house in the distance? Why do you think it is included in the painting?

What do you notice about the light in this picture?

In some senses there are no “wrong” answers because this is not so much an art history lesson but a chance to develop greater visual perception. If you repeat this process with other works, and particularly join others who will give their impressions you will find that you enhance one another’s development of these visual skills. For example, others who respond to the questions on the painting will cause you to notice new things and will likely prompt you to even see the painting differently than you did at first.

And it is very important that you go and see the actual objects or painting that you will observe. Just now, of course because we are online, we are looking at a photographic reproduction. Photographic reproductions just cannot pick up all the subtleties of works of art and do not carry the same visual impact as the actual item. You might try going to see a painting in a gallery or museum and asking yourself these questions above and try it with a few paintings, taking your time with each one. This exercise would be greatly improved by your conducting it with a small group all looking at and responding to the same work of art. Hearing what others notice and perceive can be a valuable way of learning. What are you looking at?

Deaf Culture and Visual Literacy

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The week of 19 – 25 September 2011 is the annual International Week of the Deaf (held each year in the last full week of September). I am a person with hearing and do not know any versions of sign language. I would love to hear from any blog readers who are deaf or hearing impaired about whether visual literacy makes a difference in your life. Fully realizing that no one speaks for others when they speak for themselves, I would like to hear if visual literacy is a proficiency that you have, if it is of interest to you, or if you think it is important. I am also wondering if you think that visual literacy contributes in a positive way to deaf culture. If the topic of visual literacy is unfamiliar to you, please see my first two posts on “Reason for This Blog” and, or, “Looking at Personification” to clarify.

Often bloggers blog about what they know. This time I am not blogging about what I know. I am asking to be taught. I want to learn. Sometimes each of us just needs to own up to not knowing things, and not having certain experiences of life, and be open to learning. And we need to be open to learning about experiences that differ from our own and in our own mind to give the experiences of others credibility although we do not—and cannot—identify with them first hand.

I hope you will contribute in comments, here, if you feel inclined. And please do tell me, what are you looking at?

How Job Performance Could Be Enhanced by Improving Visual Literacy

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At some time during the course of the work day most jobs involve looking at something and interpreting it. It could be someone’s face and attitude or mood that you’re looking at. It could be trends in a graph, or some other kind of visually presented data. If you have the advantage of highly developed visual perception (training your eyes to see and “read” detail, as I am discussing here, in this blog) and visual literacy (learning to know well what it is you are looking at), you will have an advantage over others who do not possess these skills. Use of these skills could enhance your job performance.

And because most fields, and most jobs, involve working with and understanding people, and visual literacy skills relate to aesthetics based on human beings and human forms and experience, there is a direct relationship, here. A relationship between visual literacy, job performance, and greater human understanding.

If you are a doctor, and you sharpen your visual literacy, you will likely be better able to notice subtle differences in mood and facial expression that can help you understand your patients’ reactions and actions. Further, as a doctor, when your eyes have been trained to pick up on subtleties, you will notice progress and changes in shape and physical detail that could aid your diagnosis of various conditions and diseases.

Teachers can use this training both with their students and for themselves. It can be used with students to teach them greater visual literacy; and for teachers’ own benefit in understanding what is happening with their students. There are many applications of these skills for improving approaches to educating students. These include subtle things like understanding that something may be wrong at home—by a change in facial expression and posture or stance—ranging to a better understanding of what makes individual students tick by perceiving their reactions to things, and thus how you might better motivate the students. What you perceive visually can inform your understanding, and in turn can help you as a teacher to appropriately assist students.

For the students’ benefit in their own visual literacy, when they learn these skills they would be better able to describe and understand what they see, which can lead to greater literacy in the written word, as well as greater visual literacy. The two forms of literacy—visual and written—enhance one another.

Even driving a vehicle is improved by visual training, through sharpening perception and developing greater visual literacy. This training gives you a better perception of stance and movement, among other things, which contribute to seeing more when you look. It’s not fool proof—nothing is—but you’ll notice increased perception of the first evidence when other drivers are about to pull out, or shift lanes, as well as early indications of when pedestrians are wanting to cross the street. These moves often begin subtly.

How could visual literacy improve your life, or your work life? What are you looking at?

Reasons for This Blog

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It is one of my dreams to help make the world more visually literate, and so to aid people in seeing more when they look. For me the medium for this skill-sharpening is looking at works of art and the designs of things. I want people to see more deeply everywhere they look. Developing the skill of looking deeply at art and design makes you better able to discern and describe what you see and so to glean more information and enrichment from what you see. So I am going to talk about seeing more deeply–or put another way–cultivating deeper visual perception.

Why does this matter to me? For several reasons.

  • I love when people learn things that enrich their day-to-day living for the rest of their lives.
  • I love witnessing and contributing to this learning.
  • Being more visually literate has a knock-on effect of making people more observant. Being more observant has implications in many aspects of life and many fields of work, from better diagnoses by doctors, to more accurate calls in sporting events, to enhancing both visual and linguistic skills in synch together, to navigating better relationships through noticing subtleties in facial expressions, to separating the feat from the naff, and more. (i.e. A feat of design versus a truly naff exercise in creation. Yes, I coined this expreession, for better or for worse.)
  • A more visually literate population is going to make a better audience for art and therefore increase the opportunities for artists, thus increasing the quality of life for
    all of us, and hopefully making our environment better respected and more enjoyable, to boot!

In this blog I’ll be discussing aspects of seeing more deeply, how it affects our day-to-day life, and ways of cultivating these skills. This set of skills, which is often called connoisseurship in artistic circles, has many applications in other fields of employment. These include detective work, inspection roles, the medical professions, culinary arts, and many other areas of work. Probably most fields and lines of work could be enhanced by this skill set being improved. I’ll talk about that more, another time soon.

At the very least, to see works of art and design more deeply, is to understand human
beings and the human condition better. It teaches you to pick up on more subtle visual cues and it sharpens your ability to interpret these cues.

Widespread enhanced visual literacy has huge implications for individuals (in quality of
life) and for society (in quality of public life), and I’ll explore these in future posts. It has implications for creating a more sophisticated public, or audience, for art and design which could lead to an overall improvement in design for everything. For example, there is no reason that a pen has to be ugly. It can be expertly designed for both function and looks.

I am not putting myself forward as an arbiter of taste nor am I suggesting that my taste should prevail. While I will mention my own taste at times, instead, I want people to care more about what things look like and to show caring by seeing more of what is there than many of us currently do. This is beyond simply being more observant. It means literally learning to see more deeply, or put another way, it means becoming able to see beyond what we used to be able to see, even when we were being more observant. It happens through training your eyes, habitually. Habitual use being key, as with the development of any skill set.

I hope that readers of this blog will reflect on their own experience, using the world as their gallery, and will come to a deeper enjoyment of their own sharpening powers of observation, their own enhanced visual literacy. Whether a design is for a pen, a package, a park, or a picture, I hope you explore seeing it more deeply and to find visual virtues (and vices!) with your expanding visual literacy.

Let’s go look at things, deeply!