Literacy in Today’s Diverse

English ClassroomBy Crystal L. Beach

Virginia Tech, English/English Education

‘Visual literacy’ will begin to be a matter of survival…

- Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images

Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from

information presented in the form of an image. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read”

and that meaning can be communicated through a process of

reading.- Wikipedia

At present, most persons (from children watching their television sets to adults

looking at magazine ads) are visually literate in the sense that they are capable of receiving and acting on the signals sent

out to them by electronic and printed pictures. They are not visually literate if by literacy we mean the ability to understand

the rhetoric…-Edmund Feldman, “Visual Literacy”

Each time they picked up a manual, jumped online to

instant message a friend, or got on the Metro and headed into town, they were readers.

-Sara Kajder, Bringing the Outside In

…it is crucial to look very carefully at the image or images in which you are interested, because the image itself has its own

effects.-Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies

…students have a much richer imagination for how

the visual might enter composition than our

journals have yet to address. -Diana George, “From Analysis to Design:

Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing”

Mandala

Compositional Interpretation: content, color, spatial

organization, light, and expressive content

-Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies

Literacy as we know it is not in a crisis, but instead evolving

as we know it.- Crystal Beach