Visual Teaching Alliance

All Blog Posts (756)

Science and Research on Visual Learning

Exploring vision, understanding and retention in the light of recent breakthroughs in our understanding of the workings of the brain and conclusions for brain friendly teaching.

Large demo materials create powerful learning environments and makes the displayed image seem important in itself. As a result of my work as image editor for our visual encyclopedias, I have been fascinated for years by the reactions of users as they initially browse through our… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on August 11, 2009 at 9:52am — No Comments

Teaching the Visual-Spatial Learning Disabled Child: When Moving About is Confusing

A child in your class does fine when he’s in one place, but moving around seems to leave him bewildered. He can’t find his way to the bathroom or to the people or things he is looking for. He has been in this school for two years now and this problem is ongoing. How can you help him?

As teachers, we are familiar with students who have trouble processing sound (they have auditory processing and/or language problems) or have trouble coordinating movements (they appear uncoordinated).… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on August 6, 2009 at 10:46am — No Comments

Photography: Addressing Media Exploration and Visual Literacy

INTRODUCTION

Visual Literacy

Visual literacy is fundamental to the teaching of art in middle school and complements student exploration of the question, “What is Art?” This is one of the first questions asked in my art classes, generating answers ranging from “I don’t know!” to “Stuff in a museum?” to “It’s just self-expression!” These first tentative answers often reveal a lack of developed cognitive perception, mere lingering memories of elementary school art… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on August 4, 2009 at 1:10pm — No Comments

Visual Education: A New Language (January, 1937)

WHEN WILL THE MIDDLE AGES BE AT AN END? As soon as all men can participate in a common culture and the canyon between educated and uneducated people has disappeared. Life in that future day will be more fully lived and understood. Perhaps everyone will work as a specialist in his special field, but at the same time he will--he must--vividly take part in the common life, sharing understanding of and responsibility for the main problems of his world.

Our generation is opening the way… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on August 3, 2009 at 3:59pm — No Comments

A Thousand Words: Promoting Teachers' Visual Literacy Skills

We live in a visual world. Images and graphics have revolutionized the way we receive and process information, both within and beyond the classroom.

AS early as 1964, Marshall McLuhan spoke of the social evolution from "typographic" man, who relied on text as the primary means of information delivery to "graphics" man, whose thoughts, beliefs, and values were forged by images. Within this "revolution," as McLuhan called it, the camera replaced text as the ultimate… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 30, 2009 at 10:14am — No Comments

Creating a Virtual Learning Environment for Gifted and Talented Learners.

Article Excerpt

Your school has just eliminated the gifted and talented pull-out program due to budgetary constraints. Therefore, all gifted and talented students will now be taught in the general education classroom. One of your kindergarten students, Sean, is academically gifted and is advanced beyond his peers in math, social studies, and science. He is computer literate. Sean is constantly playing computer games and uses the computer for his classroom and homework… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 28, 2009 at 11:25am — No Comments

An Introduction to Visual Culture

Modern life takes place onscreen. Life in industrialized countries is increasingly lived under constant video surveillance from cameras in buses and shopping malls, on highways and bridges, and next to ATM cash machines. More and more people look back, using devices ranging from traditional cameras to camcorders and Webcams. At the same time, work and leisure are centred on visual media from computers to Digital Video Disks. Human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 27, 2009 at 11:11am — No Comments

Color in an Optimum Learning Environment

Color is an important factor in the physical learning environment and is a major element in interior design that impacts student achievement, as well as teacher effectiveness and staff efficiency. Research has demonstrated that specific colors and patterns directly influence the health, morale, emotions, behavior, and performance of learners, depending on the individual’s culture, age, gender, and developmental level, the subject being studied, and the activity being conducted.

Color… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 23, 2009 at 10:27am — No Comments

Visual-Spatial Intelligence

The ability to accurately perceive the visual world and to re-create, manipulate and modify aspects of one's perceptions (even in the absence of the relevant visual stimuli). Visual-spatial intelligence deals with shapes, patterns, designs and the entire spectrum of colour - and with the placement and relationship of objects in space, including distance and direction. It includes our capacity to visualise, dream and imagine.

CHARACTERISTICS

Attention to visual… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 22, 2009 at 9:46am — No Comments

Why Visual Literacy

The incessant broadcast and print recycling of the April 2003 Reuters photograph of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad revealed the importance of art--specifically commemorative sculptural portraits--to the Iraqis. It also demonstrated importance of media images to people all over the world. What do such images mean? Why are they so important?

In a television-dominated society, each person must develop the ability to create his or her own… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 21, 2009 at 11:20am — No Comments

Picture This: Literary Theory and the Study of Visual Culture

An address delivered at La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, March 2000

In my remarks this afternoon I want to raise some questions about how we have historicized the concept of the visual in visual culture studies. I will be arguing that how we historicize visual culture is inextricably linked to how we theorize the visual and visuality. Visual culture studies has developed around the idea that postmodernity is dominated by the visual representation of meaning, and that this marks its… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 20, 2009 at 9:12am — No Comments

Eidetic Imagery

Everyone knows what it is like to close one's eyes and call up a visual image using the "mind's eye." For most people this image is usually fleeting and undetailed, but for those who possess an ability for eidetic imagery, this image is like a tangible picture that can be manipulated and seen in great detail.

Eidetic imagery is a psychological puzzle that has multiple definitions, an extensive history, and a long list of characteristics. The exact relationship between eidetic imagery… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 16, 2009 at 10:34am — No Comments

'Minds Eye' Influences Visual Perception

Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the "mind's eye"—directly impacts our visual perception.

"We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception," says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. "This is the first research to definitively show… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 13, 2009 at 10:39am — No Comments

Media and Attention, Cognition, and School Achievement

Introduction

Marie Evans Schmidt and Elizabeth Vandewater review research on links between various types of electronic media and the cognitive skills of school-aged children and adolescents. One central finding of studies to date, they say, is that the content delivered by electronic media is far more influential than the media themselves.

Most studies, they point out, find a small negative link between the total hours a child spends viewing TV and that child's… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 10, 2009 at 10:02am — No Comments

Visual Culture

What is Visual Culture?

Visual culture is concerned with everything we see, have seen, or may visualize-paintings, sculptures, movies, television, photographs, furniture, utensils, gardens, dance, buildings, artifacts, landscape, toys, advertising, jewelry, apparel, light, graphs, maps, websites, dreams-in short, all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means. We draw on methodologies from the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. We focus on… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 8, 2009 at 8:50am — No Comments

Technology That Enhances Visual-Spatial Intelligence

Today's students have grown up watching television and are highly oriented to visual learning. Slides, overhead transparencies, filmstrips, and movies are important adjuncts to their learning. Copy-machines and computer- printers are also essential support systems for any kind of academic work. When interactive systems are also part of the learning process, students move from passive observers to active thinkers.

For example the VCR, which is available to most teachers, lends itself… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 6, 2009 at 9:40am — No Comments

Introducing Visual Culture: Ways of Looking at All Things Visual

Emergence of a new paradigm for studying all forms of visual culture as parts of a cross-media system

Some Key Points to Consider

- "Visual Culture" studies recognizes the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the postmodern world.

- Has there been a social and cultural shift to the visual, over against the verbal and textual, in the past 50 years, and has it been accelerating in the past 10 or 20 years?

- Or… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 2, 2009 at 9:24am — No Comments

Moving Toward Visual Literacy: Photography as a Language of Teacher Inquiry

Introduction

During the past two decades in the United States, teacher inquiry has become a dominant focus of contemporary early childhood teacher education programs (Hill, Stremmel, & Fu, 2004; Hubbard & Power, 2003; Burnaford, Fischer, & Hobson, 2001; Moran, 2002; Fosnot, 1989). Teacher inquiry is characterized by "both new and experienced teachers [who] pose problems, identify discrepancies between theories and practices, challenge common routines, draw on the… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 30, 2009 at 9:41am — No Comments

Will Video Games Reshape Education?

Scientists call it the next great discovery, a way to captivate students so much they will spend hours learning on their own. It's the new vision of video games. The Federation of American Scientists--which typically weighs in on matters of nuclear weaponry and government secrecy--recently declared that video games can redefine education. Capping a year of study, the group has called for federal research into how the addictive pizzazz of video games can be converted into serious learning tools… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 29, 2009 at 9:32am — No Comments

Thoughts On Visual Teaching

Many people think verbally. The spoken language flows through the thought processes like a typewriter creating a story. All people think visually, continually translating words and ideas it pictures so that concepts and thoughts surface. In other words, we all understand, or decode, the visual language, but a true visual thinker has nonlinear thought, as if to be exercising cognition through computer simulation, then transforming the data into animation, or encoding. Thoughts become movies,… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 25, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments