Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-j7cmm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-07T09:16:33.140Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A short history of visual literacy: the first five decades

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2017

Alan Michelson
Alan Michelson*
Affiliation:
Head, Built Environments Library 334 Gould Hall University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195-5730 USA Email: alanmich@uw.edu

Abstract

The origins and history of Visual literacy (VL) are summarized in this article, from the 1960s writings of John L. Debes, Marshall McLuhan and others of the Rochester School, to the influence of the Internet in the 2000s. ERIC and Google Scholar searches are used to analyse the evolution of its literature over time.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 42 , Special Issue 2: Information Literacy in UK and US Art Libraries , April 2017 , pp. 95 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © ARLIS/UK&Ireland 2017 

Visual literacy (VL) first began to be discussed in the intellectual and social ferment of the 1960s. Methods of teaching and education came under scrutiny, with critics often noting how standard modes of learning did not take into account fundamental social changes brought about by new technologies during the “Information Age”.

The topic has been approached from a wide variety of perspectives for approximately 50 years. “Among the areas that have been mentioned as contributing to the study of visual literacy are aesthetics, anatomy of the eye, body language, cognitive psychology, communication theory, cultural anthropology, instructional technology, mental imagery, neurophysiology, perceptual development, psycholinguistics, semantics, and visual perception.”Footnote 1 It has been in only the last decade that educators have reached some consensus on what the term can mean. As outlined in the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (2011), the visually literate person should be able to do the following:

  • • Determine the nature and extent of the visual materials needed

  • • Find and access needed images and visual media effectively and efficiently

  • • Interpret and analyze the meanings of images and visual media

  • • Evaluate images and their sources

  • • Use images and visual media effectively

  • • Design and create meaningful images and visual media

  • • Understand many of the ethical, legal, social, and economic issues surrounding the creation and use of images and visual media, and access and use visual materials ethicallyFootnote 2

These standards were a long time in development. As noted in Braden's comprehensive study of its theoretical foundations (1993), the concept of “visual literacy” drew broadly from philosophy (particularly the work of University of Rochester professor Colin M. Turbayne), linguistics, psychology, and art history and criticism, but emanated directly from the 1960s writings of John L. Debes, a long-time employee of the Eastman Kodak Company with close ties to the University of Rochester.Footnote 3 Influenced by semiotics and the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Debes, and others of the “Rochester School,” believed that the apprehension of and meanings derived from visual images were fundamental to learning in children.Footnote 4 He wrote (1972), “… Children learn to perceive and interpret, that is to ‘read’ body language and other visual signs before they begin to perceive and interpret, to ‘read’ the words they hear. In fact, for the seeing child, it is primarily the successful ‘reading’ of visual signs that makes possible the ‘reading’ of heard verbal signs. For him, this primacy of visual information in human development made it a critical feature in the formation of language and, subsequently, knowledge.”Footnote 5

Debes contended that modern media exerted tremendous influence on childhood development. Television, particularly, had changed how we learned. He wrote: “The adult world seems now to prefer to channel its thoughts into linear forms; even the thoughts it puts on television, but the ‘television generation’ has shown a resistance to being linear. …It appears doubtful that many people brought up before TV will be able to analyze and deal with the changed and changing consciousness of the new generation. McLuhan is surely correct in asserting the improbability that the mind functions in a linear manner. Because it does not, multi-image displays on television have helped free young minds from the imposition of linear forms.”Footnote 6 Debes and his associates who, in 1968 formed the International Visual Literacy Association, created the foundation on which about 50 years’ worth of visual literacy scholarship has rested.

Three aspects of visual literacy have remained consistent during this 50-year span. First, Debes held that images and their early study formed the building blocks of language-creation and the creation of meaning. Second, he asserted that new information technologies had indelibly changed people and how they learned. Third, he believed that the prevailing educational relationship between active teacher and passive student needed to be changed to respond to new technological conditions. “An inappropriate emphasis is put upon verbal, linear and rote thinking, which serves to alienate students from what is supposed to be a learning process. It is inappropriate not because the educators are numbskulls, or because they are inept, or poorly trained, but because the nature of students has changed. Mass communications have provided children with vast amounts of information and many varied methods of accumulating data; they are truly turned-on, with many channels open. Yet, teaching continues to aim along only one of those channels.”Footnote 7 He underscored that teachers needed to allow students higher levels of self-direction in their own learning.Footnote 8 “When you give a child the opportunity to do something about a situation he is presented with in the classroom or elsewhere, he stands the possibility of learning.” Debes, echoing John Dewey, made the case for students to take a less passive role in learning, anticipating “student-directed learning” and “active learning instructional strategies” developed in the 1990s.Footnote 9

During the first decade of VL discussion, a variety of authors, most notably Debes, Clarence Williams, Roger Fransecky, Steven Barley, and Edmund Feldman, contributed general conceptions about the topic; most were affiliated with the disciplines of education, communications studies, psychology or art theory. Clinical psychologist Fransecky, who at one time taught at the University of Rochester, co-authored with Debes the widely read, NEA publication, Visual Literacy: A Way to Learn–A Way to Teach (1972), outlining how visual literacy could be added to school curricula.Footnote 10 D.A. Dondis's early book, A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), was a heavily quoted early source for information on design compositional basics.Footnote 11 Several foundational bibliographies were compiled in this early period, including those by Benning and Jonassen and Fork.Footnote 12 K-12 educators were very active in developing projects that would test visual literacy concepts for their needs. Cianciolo's article, “Use wordless picture books to teach reading, visual literacy and to study literature,” was an important early attempt to implement visual literacy components in an elementary education setting.Footnote 13 As reflected in a search for “visual literacy” in ERIC (search done 12/06/2016) and Google Scholar (searched 12/07/2016), most publication occurred between 1973 and 1978, and tailed off until 1980.

During the 1980s, the numbers of articles indexed in ERIC and Google Scholar under the search “Visual Literacy” dropped in the former and rose in the latter; this could possibly indicate a drop in interest among education scholars and a rise in interdisciplinary focus on VL. As per Google, publication peaked in 1984 and during the last four years of the decade. Two of the decade's most-cited publications, D. Sless's “Visual Literacy: A Failed Opportunity,” and Cassidy and Knowlton's “Visual Literacy: A Failed Metaphor?” cast a negative light on the topic.Footnote 14 The latter authors stated: “…As we delved more deeply into the quagmire that is ‘visual literacy,’ it became ever clearer that the VL metaphor lacks any redeeming value. Indeed, this metaphor has an insidious influence….”Footnote 15 They reasoned that if text and images were “…more dissimilar that similar, and it they thereby tend to serve two different ends, we should then examine what pictures (or other iconic signs) do best and consider how words (or other digital signs) best complement the use of pictures.” O'Rourke, however, in “Whatever Happened to Visual Literacy?” questioned why more scholarship wasn't being produced in the area.Footnote 16

In general, efforts continued at creating basic definitions of the subject of inquiry, most notably two books, Sinatra's Visual Literacy Connections to Thinking, Reading and Writing Identifying the Theoretical Foundations of Visual Literacy and Curtiss's Introduction to Visual Literacy: A Guide to the Visual Arts and Communication.Footnote 17 Education professor J.A. Hortin emerged as an oft-cited scholar on VL, with his report, Visual Literacy and Visual Thinking and article (co-authored by Bradent) “Identifying the Theoretical Foundations of Visual Literacy”.Footnote 18 Increasingly, authors made efforts at applying visual literacy to specific subject disciplines within K-12 and college curricula, an example in point, Considine's “Visual Literacy and Children's Books: An Integrated Approach”.Footnote 19 Others employed Cianciaolo's wordless picture books to test student comprehension of non-verbal signs.Footnote 20 Several authors performed historiographic studies on the literature within a single teaching discipline, e.g., Schlenker and Perry's “A Survey Review of Visual Literacy 1965–1975 with a Slant toward Science Education”.Footnote 21

The number of articles burgeoned in visual literacy during the 1990s, indicating a spike in interest among all educators. Librarians became more engaged participants in the VL discussion, taking a more activist stance in reaction to Reagan Administration's highly publicized study on US education, A Nation at Risk;Footnote 22 according to Behrens, “The adoption of the information literacy goal was the library profession's response to having its role essentially ignored or overlooked in the educational reform process.” Thereafter, consensus within academic libraries formed advocating more active collaboration with faculty, using information and visual literacy frameworks. Patricia Breivik, an important advocate of this more activist stance, indicated that “…in order to improve undergraduate education, it would become vital for libraries to integrate fully with the learning process.”Footnote 23 Questions among educators persisted about concretizing the definitions of VL, and Avgerinou and Ericson's “A Review of the Concept of Visual Literacy,” cited Baca and Braden's use of the Delphi Technique to create a “crowd-sourced” definition of VL.Footnote 24 Messaris's book, Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality, proved to be one of the most-read books of the decade, encouraging critical thinking when assessing images of all kinds.Footnote 25 Over the course of this decade, books by Considine and Haley, Moore and Dwyer, and Tompkins, and articles by Messaris firmed up the broad theoretical foundations of VL.Footnote 26 Significant applications of VL to specific educational disciplines also appeared in the 1990s, including in children's books (Galda and Short), science (Trumbo), and art (Raney).Footnote 27

Additionally, mass expansion of Internet access during this decade further spurred efforts at enhancing VL education. Inevitably, articles appeared about the internet's immense impact on learning. Bolter's “Hypertext and the Question of Visual Literacy” explored the impact of the Internet's hypertext capabilities on learning. He wrote: “The computer is reopening for us the problem of the relation of word and image--specifically how images are constituted as part of the texts that we confront in school and in the working world. Are there two literacies (verbal and visual), or is there only one? This question may now be addressed in the light of electronic texts that combine words and images and do not read (or act) like traditional printed texts.” He concludes his essay by saying, “. . . the status of graphics and visual literacy may well be the great open question facing education in the coming years.”Footnote 28 Bolter's work was the most cited and one of the earliest of many articles highlighting the Internet's vast cultural influence and potential.

During the 2000s, the numbers of articles tagged for “visual literacy” in ERIC and Google Scholar diverged dramatically in scale, but they both show the trend of increasing output in the latter part of the decade. Clearly by this time, years of internet usage had re-enlivened the discussion in VL and ensconced it as significant topic of discourse. The lower numbers of indexed works in ERIC suggests a decrease in interest among education scholars during the 2000s and 2010s; increased numbers in the more general Google Scholar index during this same time span, might suggest a growing embrace of VL from a range of scholars outside education, including significant numbers of librarians.

Writers on the topic of VL over nearly 50 years have continued to echo Debes's three underlying concepts arguing that: 1.) Critical analysis and documentation of images is increasingly important, 2.) New information technologies change childhood development and require new educational approaches, and 3.) Students need to exert greater activity in the learning process. Whether these premises are true or not, they have proven durable.

References

1. Levie, W. Howard, “A prospectus for instructional research on visual literacy,” Educational Communication and Technology 26(1) (1978): 25–36 Google Scholar

2. Hattwig, Denise, et al. “ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,” Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), October 2011, accessed December 8, 2016, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy.

3. R. A. Braden, “Twenty-five years of visual literacy research,” ERIC Number: ED370548, 1993. Available https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED370548. Accessed on 8 December 2016.

4. Rochester, NY, became a fertile source for visual literacy theorizing in the late 1960s and 1970s, due to the presence of the Australian philosopher Colin Murray Turbayne (1916–2006) and education professor Clarence Myron Williams (1921–2004) at the University of Rochester as well as the location in the same city of two significant companies doing varied research into visual information collection and storage, Eastman Kodak and Xerox. Debes was a longtime employee at Kodak, its “Coordinator of Visual Learning” from 1970–1977. Simultaneous with his work at Kodak, Debes also earned a B.S. in General Studies at the University of Rochester (1971) as well as a Master of Education (1973). The first conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) was held in Rochester in March 1969, and was co-chaired by Debes and Williams; it attracted 350 attendees and helped to elevate the concept of visual literacy to academic prominence. For more on the Rochester School, see Moore, David M., and Dwyer, Francis M., Visual Literacy: A Spectrum of Visual Learning. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1994), p. 24 Google Scholar. See also “International Visual Literacy Association Records 1969–2001,” Arizona Archives Online, Arizona State University, accessed March 4, 2017, http://www.azarchivesonline.org/xtf/view?docId=ead/asu/ivlarec.xml;query=visual%20literacy%20collection;brand=default and “John L. Debes III Collection 1964–1985,” Arizona Archives Online, Arizona State University, accessed March 4, 2017, http://www.azarchivesonline.org/xtf/view?docId=ead/asu/debes.xml;query=visual%20literacy%20collection;brand=default.

5. Debes, J. L., “Chapter 8. visual literacy,” in American Education in the Electric Age: New Perspectives on Media and Learning, ed. Klinge, Peter L. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1974), 113 Google Scholar

6. Debes, “Chapter 8. Visual Literacy,” 115.

7. Ibid., 117.

8. Ibid., 118

9. Bonwell, C. C. & Eison, J. A., Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. Washington, DC: Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, 1991, 1 Google Scholar.

10. Fransecky, R. B. & Debes, J. L., Visual Literacy: A Way to Learn–a Way to Teach. (Washington, DC: Association for Educational Communications and Technology, 1972)Google Scholar.

11. Dondis, D. A., A Primer of Visual Literacy. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

12. Benning, V. E., “An Annotated Bibliography Concerning Visual Literacy.” (Washington, DC: ERIC, 1973)Google Scholar; Jonassen, D. & Fork, D. J., “Visual Literacy: A Bibliographic Survey.” (Washington, DC: ERIC, 1975)Google Scholar.

13. Cianciolo, P. J., “Use wordless picture books to teach reading, visual literacy and to study literature,” Top of the News 29(3): 226–335 Google Scholar.

14. Sless, D., “Visual literacy: a failed opportunity,” Educational Technology Research and Development 32(4): (1984), 224–228 Google Scholar; Cassidy, M. F. & Knowlton, J. Q., “Visual literacy: a failed metaphor?,” Educational Communication and Technology Journal (ECTJ), 31(2):(1983), 67–90 Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., 88.

16. O'Rourke, B., “Nonprint media: whatever happened to visual literacy?,” The English Journal 70(2): (1981), 71–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Sinatra, R., Visual Literacy Connections to Thinking, Reading and Writing. (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1986)Google Scholar. Curtiss, D., Introduction to Visual Literacy: A Guide to the Visual Arts and Communication. (Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987)Google Scholar.

18. Hortin, J. A., Visual Literacy and Visual Thinking. (Washington, DC: ERIC, 1980)Google Scholar. Bradent, R. A. & Hortin, J. A., “Identifying the theoretical foundations of visual literacy,” Journal of Visual Verbal Languaging 2(2): (1982), 37–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Considine, D. M., “Visual literacy and children's books: an integrated approach,” School Library Journal 33(1): (1986), 38–42 Google Scholar

20. Read, D. & Smith, H. M., “Teaching visual literacy through wordless picture books,” The Reading Teacher 35(8): (1982), 928–933 Google Scholar

21. Schlenker, R. M. & Perry, C. M., A Survey Review of Visual Literacy 1965–1975 with a Slant toward Science Education, (Washington, DC: ERIC, 1983)Google Scholar.

22. Gardner, D. P., A Nation at Risk. (Washington, DC: National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983)Google Scholar.

23. Behrens, S. J., “A conceptual analysis and historical overview of information literacy,” College and Research Libraries 55(4): (1994), 313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Avgerinou, M. & Ericson, J., “A review of the concept of visual literacy,” British Journal of Educational Technology 28(4): (1997), 283–284 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Baca, J. C. & Braden, R. A., “The delphi study: A proposed method for resolving visial literacy uncertainties,” in Perceptions of Visual Literacy, eds Braden, R. A., Beauchamp, D. G. & Baca, J. C. (ILVA, Inc: Arkansas), 99–106 Google Scholar

25. Messaris, P., Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality. (New York: Westview Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

26. Considine, D. M. & Haley, G. E., Visual Messages: Integrating Imagery into Instruction. A Teacher Resource for Media and Visual Literacy. (Englewood, CO: Teacher Ideas Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Moore, D. M. & Dwyer, F. M., Visual Literacy: A Spectrum of Visual Learning. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1994)Google Scholar; Tompkins, G. E., Language Arts: Content and Teaching Strategies. (Des Moines, IA: Merrill, 1998)Google Scholar; Messaris, P., “Visual ‘literacy’: a theoretical synthesis.” Communication Theory, 3(4): (1993), 277–294 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Messaris, P., “Visual aspects of media literacy,” Journal of Communication 48(1): (1998), 70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Galda, L. & Short, K. G., “Children's books visual literacy: exploring art and illustration in children's books,” The Reading Teacher 46(6): (1993), 506–516 Google Scholar; Trumbo, J., “Visual literacy and science communication,” Science Communication 20(4): (1999), 409–425 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raney, K., “Visual literacy and the art curriculum,” International Journal of Art and Design Education 18(1): (1999), 41–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Bolter, J. D., “Hypertext and the question of visual literacy,” in Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformations in a Post-Typographic World, eds Reinking, D., McKenna, M. C., Labbo, L. D. & Kieffer, R. D. (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1998), 3–13 Google Scholar.