Week 4, January 29th 2020

I think it is extremely interesting that there are very few standards for visual literacy. It is not a major part of standards so I feel that many teachers skip over it and don't include teaching visual literacy in the classroom. Most of the Common Core standards are under reading: literature under the .7 category. It is also interesting that visual literacy encompasses a wide variety of materials, that we don't really realize we see every day. Things like advertisements or movies are included in visual literacy. Visual literacy is sometimes taught or encouraged in elementary schools. At the elementary school I work at, the library has a wide range of graphic novels and students are encouraged to pick them out, as well as non-graphic novels. The students seem to be invested in the series and get very excited when new books are added. I remember in my elementary school, we would use graphic organizers when learning how to write essays and stories. We would draw pictures in boxes like graphic novels, and use a space below to describe what was going on in the scene. We would then combine all the descriptions of each picture and use that as the base for our writing. I know a few of my friends used this technique through middle and part of high school because they could work better through pictures. As a teacher, I would encourage students to use whatever resources are at their disposal to show their writing ability, and if that means this technique would work better for them, I would try and accept that as their final work rather than a formal essay. Throughout high school, we never were taught or encouraged to use visual literacy skills in our English classes. Students who worked better through pictures were encouraged to pursue art and were only allowed to use graphic-novel-style work when it was purely creative, which didn’t happen very often. As a teacher, I hope to be able to better fuel student’s creativity and encourage them to think out of the box.