Visual literacy

‘Children should learn to ask questions about what they see. Teach them to interpret the pictures,’ was the conclusion of a symposium about children and picture culture, that was held in cooperation with the Fotomuseum at Rotterdam. When children are able to interpret visual information and the messages behind it, they can deal better with the enormous amount of pictures they have to digest every day. This trained way of looking is called visual literacy. With the exposition for children: IK KLIK, that was brought about in cooperation with children, the Fotomuseum wants to contribute to the development of children when dealing with the continuous flow of images that reaches them daily.

The exposition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam can be visited until 3 december 2006

www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl

A picture can be explained in different ways

What do you see at this picture?













• A Ufo landed accidentily on a nineteenth century building.
• This photo is manipulated; this cannot exist in the real world.
• The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A new building constructed over the corner of an old building.

assessment for picturethinking

I found an assessment for picturethinking on the web. You only need to find out in what direction a person looks when he thinks about a question. A person looking upwards while thinking is supposed to be a visual thinker. A pity that this kind of nonsense spreads on the web.
Luckily there are scientists who speak out against it: Prof.Willem Levelt, professor in psycholinguistics at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, writes in an article in the magazine Intermediair of november 17, 1995 that there is no relation between direction of looking and the so called active representationsystems. You can find the article (in Dutch) at: www.skepsis.nl/nlp.html

Could Tyson be a picturethinker? To find out we start with the first step: we pose a question that will make him think...
'Tyson, what did you eat yesterday?'...







Tyson thinks it through...and yes, he looks upwards while thinking.
That means according to this assessment that Tyson is a picturethinker!

(If you can see a thought balloon on the picture, with a tasty bone in it, you are a picturethinker too!)

Pictures get meaning by naming them

It is often said that we are born as picturethinkers and learn the language later. That is not correct. First we learn to listen and with that comes language development. In the uterus we start learning our mother tongue by listening to the voice of our mother. Listening we need to learn to speak, wich is a matter of survival, because we need to learn to communicate as fast as possible.
Looking, visual thinking and using our imagination are things we start doing in our first year of life. When you lie in your craddle, you do not need it very much. Children who start crawling and walking, constantly name everything they see. That way they start seeing more. And learn more words. The next step is naming things that are not present, but can be seen in your thoughts.
Pictures get meaning by naming them. Pictures must be 'read'. Picturethinking is connected with language.