Tools for Analysing Visual Literacy in the Middle Years

Due to the release of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy report Teaching Reading (Rowe 2005), the Australian eduscape has yet again been replete with arguments about which approach is best for the teaching of literacy. Many literacy teacher educators such as myself bemoan the resurfaced narrowness of the public and policy arguments and decry the overly simplistic definition of literacy as basic reading skills involving phonemic awareness and phonic mastery. Many of us have moved on from such debates and are facing the more pressing challenge of preparing students for the knowledge demands of new cultures, economies and technologies. This requires a critical engagement with the popular, community, virtual [and visual] cultures that students inhabit (Luke 2001). In particular, it demands responses to questions about how literacy learning, and the pedagogy that mediates it, is to be reshaped.In such a redefinition the notion of multiliteracies is foregrounded: multiliteracies that embrace not only the ever expanding communication technologies, but the equally significant social, cultural, and citizen aspects (Bull and Anstey 2003), requiring that along with the ability to critically analyse texts, students will be engaged in social responsibilities and interactions associated with the interpretations of the varied texts that reflect linguistic and cultural diversities. The conversation here is specifically pedagogical. It offers an excursion into one specific multi-modal text form - the visual (often with accompanying written language) - and the meaning-conveying features of such texts, i.e. images, symbols and signs. The aim is to explore the notion that to teach students visual literacy is to engage them in: • seeing and understanding how visual texts construct worlds, cultures and identities in powerful and often overtly ideological ways via semiotic grammars and cultural tools • creating and using visual texts as social tools in ways that allow for a reconstruction of these worlds, cultures and identities.