One of the main purposes of the classroom-based research featured in this article was to develop 9-year-old students' visual meaning-making skills and competences by focusing specifically on elements of visual art and design in picturebooks. The complexity of the picturebook format requires and rewards slow looking by readers/viewers. However,…

Participation in a classroom-based study provided Grade 4 students with multiple opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. Intentionally-designed instruction during the multifaceted research included a variety of…

Explicit pedagogy that focuses on visual design and composition principles can affect students' responses to and understanding, interpretation and analysis of images, as well as the creation of their own visual representations. This article considers the why, the what, and the how of teaching various visual elements of art and design to students…

Visual and verbal literacy skills are crucial to children because of their relationship to reading, and to adults because of their social utility. Such skills are, paradoxically, among those least often developed in a systematic fashion in elementary schools. One reason for this is that component subskills of visual and verbal literacy are…

Phrase that provides the title for this article is rooted in one of the most common and erroneous assumptions made by persons who use pictures for instructional or enrichment purposes; that is, if you can see it before your eyes in pictorial form, the meaning has been transferred. (Author/MB)

This report establishes a foundation of information about how children in classroom settings develop visual literacy. Data was gathered during five 45-minute sessions with a second and a fourth grade classroom during which children looked at pictures in four versions of the Noah's Ark tale. The intent was to elicit whatever children chose to say…

Visualization as a factor of intelligence includes the mental manipulation of spatial configurations and has been associated with spatial abilities, creative thinking, and conceptual problem solving. There are numerous reports of scientists and mathematicians using visualization to anticipate transformation of the external world. Artists and…

Visual literacy--seeing with insight--enables child viewers of pictures to examine elements such as color, line, shape, form, depth, and detail to see what relations exist both among these components and between what is in the picture and their previous visual experience. The viewer can extract meaning and respond to it, either by talking or…

This serial issue examines the theme of picture books as resources for art production and art response; gives specific project descriptions; and looks at the relationship between words and pictures, and the creative connection between art and language. Articles are: (1) "Editor's View" (Sharon McCoubrey); (2) "The Creative…

This document contains selected papers from the 25th annual conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA). Topics addressed in the papers include the following: visual literacy; graphic information in research and education; evaluation criteria for instructional media; understanding symbols in business presentations;…