Visually Literate Learners: Article Analysis

In the article “The Educator’s Role in Preparing Visually Literate Learners”, Metros (2008) outlines the need for the explicit teaching of visual literacy in the classroom. Given the dominance of the internet and expansion of visually saturated social media and entertainment, Metros (2008) argues that it is important that today’s multimodal students are taught how to competently engage in visual culture. Furthermore the, article briefly stresses the importance that teachers provide students with opportunities to be successful consumers and producers of images and media by teaching them how to analyse, interpret, create and compose visual images and messages (Metros, 2008).

In the article, Metros (2008) seeks to define visual literacy as:

The article explores the evolution of literacy as a concept from narrow definitions of reading and writing to encompass multimodal literacies and stresses the need for education to reflect this, arguing that students need explicit instruction in analysing and creating various texts in new ways (Alverman, 2002, cited in Seglem and Witte, 2009). In discussing the educational debate around visual literacy and its meaning, Seglem and Witte (2009) conclude that the best description for visual literacy is: “the ability to understand and use images, include the ability to think, learn and express oneself in terms of images” (Braden and Horton, 1982 quoted in Seglem and Witte,

Seglem and Witte (2009) make various recommendations and examples of ways in which teachers can facilitate visual literacy in the English classrooms. One of which was asking students to design tattoos to represent personal traits, or that of fictional Shakespearean characters, allowing for students, which allows students to represent character traits, examine the play and showcase how visual images can be used to represent their