I See What You Mean: chapter 1 (Steve Moline)

I See What You Mean

Children at Work with Visual Information

by Steve Moline

Chapter 1

Do I need this book?

This book is for the teacher or parent who believes that literacy is more than reading stories; literacy also includes reading and writing information. Similarly, information literacy is more than communicating with words, because many information texts also include important visual elements, such as diagrams, graphs, maps, and tables. To provide a complete literacy program, therefore, we need to include opportunities to draw information as well as to write it.

Many information texts use visual elements

Whether we are thinking of school textbooks, encyclopedias, street maps, brochures, catalogues, or environmental print such as road signs and shop fronts, we are surrounded by information texts which use pictures and symbols as well as words. We are reading these texts, both in books and beyond books, all the time. Students of all ages encounter these visual texts as frequently as adults do and are expected to understand them, both in school work and in everyday living. To reflect this range of literacies, a classroom program needs to include explicit instruction in how these texts work.

Many visual texts are accessible to all readers

One of the great advantages of visual texts, such as maps or diagrams, is that most of the information they provide is readily accessible to all readers, including very young children who are not yet fluent readers of words, and older students whose first language is not English. Similarly, students who are judged to be "poor writers" (when asked to write exclusively in words) are sometimes discovered to be excellent communicators if they are allowed to write the same information in a visual form, for example, as a diagram, graph, or map.

Many visual texts are complex, multilayered texts

However, visual texts are not simple texts. Reading and writing visual texts is not merely a transitional phase which is later discarded in favor of reading and writing words; visual text elements can be highly complex and are used extensively at all levels of learning through to university textbooks and postgraduate research papers. Visual texts are therefore not an academic "soft option" to verbal (words-only) texts, since they can be equally demanding to produce.

Nor are they offered here as an alternative in place of verbal texts; rather the two are seen to be complementary, as is demonstrated by the combining of the two in many reference books and textbooks at all levels. Because a diagram can provide many layers of information and because a statistical graph can often be misinterpreted, it is necessary to provide explicit instruction in what these texts do and don't mean and how these texts make meaning.

Visual texts communicate certain information more clearly than verbal texts

Consider a metropolitan street map, which provides the routes of thousands of possible journeys. We can use our visual literacy skills to calculate countless combinations of distances, directions, relative positions and even estimated journey times. If this visual information were converted to words alone, we would soon fill a book thousands of pages long. Such a book of directions would be vastly more difficult to access and the task of deciding between alternative routes would be made impossible by an apparent excess of detail. By providing the same information as a map, we can make the data more accessible, more memorable and more concise.

Which is the most appropriate text?

Students need opportunities to learn when one kind of text is more appropriate to their writing purpose than another. Choosing between making a map and writing a list of alternative routes or directions is one example. Similarly, students need practice in deciding whether a graph which summarizes data will communicate the information more clearly than a list, a table or a string of sentences which provide the same content. Students will learn to choose the appropriate text for their purpose only if their literacy program provides both practice and explicit instruction in using a variety of kinds of text.

Visual texts are widely used in electronic media

In addition to the print media (books, newspapers, street maps, brochures, etc.), visual texts are widely used in the growing array of electronic media with which students need to be familiar in order to be fully literate, both at school and elsewhere. These electronic information media include the Internet, CD-ROMs and desktop publishing, to name only a few. These media are encountered increasingly in the contexts of school, work and recreation and they rely heavily on a good understanding of how visual texts make meaning. While most of the student examples in this book are produced with pen and paper and relate especially to how printed media use visual texts, all of the forms discussed here are widely employed in the electronic information media as well.

Visual literacy is a life skill

We need visual literacy in order to get by in our everyday lives. The contexts in which visual texts are encountered include finding our way, following instructions, filling in government forms, applying for work, choosing consumer goods, planning a vacation, and so on. The visual texts associated with these tasks include maps, street directories, street signs and shop fronts, video terminal displays, weather maps, printed forms, advertising, retailers' catalogues, product labels, travel brochures, airline schedules, etc. All of these forms combine verbal and visual information to make meaning and all are organized along principles of graphic design that can be taught explicitly.

Positive outcomes

The intention of this book is not to provide "busy work" in writing diagrams, maps, etc., for their own sake. But, by focusing students on questions such as how to match the form to the writer's purpose, we can show students that writing is above all communication with a reader who will expect our text to be accessible, memorable, concise and clear.

The strategies offered in the following pages are intended to:

integrate literacy with other curriculum areas such as science and technology, human society, personal development and other key learning areas
motivate students judged to be "non-writers" and "nonreaders"
develop initiative and independence in learning, especially in the areas of research and writing
give support and confidence to those students whose strengths lie in visual perception (including visualizing research data and their own solutions), or who communicate well by drawing objects, mapping concepts and organizing content using graphic design
develop thinking skills such as selecting and combining strategies to solve problems and to initiate new solutions to writing tasks
combine verbal and visual literacies to make an integrated text

This book is available from Stenhouse Publishers.

Also available in Canada from Pembroke Publishers.

For a detailed contents list of this book click here.

This chapter has been downloaded from www.k-8visual.info

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