Bringing Visual Literacy to Life

by Jackie Whiting

Our students live in visually rich, visually stimulating environments. Whether they are watching videos on TikTok, snapchatting with friends, or posting interactive messages to Instagram, their occipital lobes are firing on all cylinders! Which means when we are working to develop their critical reading skills, we need to emphasize the deconstruction of visual texts as much as the written word. Beyond developing their primary source analysis skills, helping students to unpack and make meaning of historical paintings and photographs provides opportunities for students to process visual information kinesthetically, practice building social-emotional competencies, and consider of the role of media in society.

Whether I was teaching social studies or working as a library media specialist, one of my favorite exercises was building living tableaux—students posing to replicate a 2D image. This is fun exercise as evidenced by the Getty quarantine challenge for which there are a plethora of posts showing people using found items around their homes to pose themselves replicating famous paintings (https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-artworks-recreated-with-household-items-by-creative-geniuses-the-world-over/). Creating a living tableaux as part of visual text analysis is a kinesthetic experience that challenges students to develop empathy with the figures being depicted and even fosters conversations about media literacy.

Kinesthetic Learning

To form a tableau, I allow students time to scan the painting, then ask them to choose a person on whom they want to focus. Alternately, you can group the students and assign each group one character from the painting to consider. Then I ask students to stare at just that person and to think and wonder about that person while looking at them. I give students a moment to jot down what thoughts, feelings, and questions they have before moving to the next step. For this exercise, let's imagine that we are studying Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright (https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-wright-of-derby-an-experiment-on-a-bird-in-the-air-pump).

Once students have collected their thoughts, I ask for a student from each group to volunteer to become the person they scrutinized from the painting. These students then assemble themselves in the middle of the classroom in a re-creation of the painting. Once they are set, the rest of the class can adjust "the posers" by re-positioning them for accuracy, directing their body language and facial expressions. They may apply props from the classroom to enhance the living replication of the original. Ultimately, students will have to break the tableau to participate in the discussion so, if possible, take a picture of the students in their arrangement and post it for them to see alongside the image of the original work. Of course, they can re-compose at any time if it helps with their thinking.

Social-Emotional Competencies

When analyzing and discussing paintings, I always remind my students that every element of a painting is the conscious choice of the artist. Even happy accidents that remain in the final work do so because the artist decided they should stay. Every color, brushstroke, gesture, facial expression, object is there by choice and design. Therefore, as viewers of the painting, in order to fully engage in the artist's message, purpose, or intent, we must ask "Why?"

Before discussing, I ask students to engage in some reflective writing. I give them a few minutes to collect their thoughts about what their person thinks, feels, wonders, fears, hopes, sees, and believes. I prompt students to consider gender and gender identity, age, attire, body language, facial expression, relationship to the group, etc. as they collect their thoughts. Before we discuss the painting as a class, the students share these reflections with their small group.

I transition to whole class discussion by asking those students who posed in the tableau to share how it felt to be the person. What were they thinking about as they held the facial expression and posture of their person? Then, I ask other students to share their observations of the person they examined. Once they have explored the figures individually, I prompt them to consider the relationships between the people in the painting, and, finally, I ask what they think this painting is about. For an artwork like Joseph Wright's Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, I prompt them to push past the literal… it is a painting about an experiment (which it is), but it is also a painting of risk-taking, of questioning or inquiry, of seeking answers, of fear. In fact, I have used this painting as an introduction to a unit on the Enlightenment and students have come to the conclusion that this is a painting of the moment of becoming Enlightened. At that point, I draw their attention to the man in red. Why is he (and the bird) the only person looking at us, the viewer? What is our role in the experiment? Why did the artist make us complicit in the secret proceedings? Once you know something, you can never unknow it. Once people start to question and seek answers and learn new realities, the world can never be the same. Welcome to the Enlightenment!

Media Literacy

Creating living tableaux from historical paintings is an opportunity to discuss the function of these paintings at the time they were made. Some are allegorical and provide moral and ethical instruction, others are portraits that document not just the existence but also the status and relationships of their subjects. Embedded in these paintings is an opportunity to examine the relationship between patrons of the arts and the artists they sponsor and wonder who had the most control over the message of the work. Media—even centuries-old media—is content created for a purpose with a specific audience in mind. As viewers, we must query that purpose. Sometimes the artists leave not-so-subtle clues in their paintings that indicate their feelings about their patron and the story they are being paid to tell. Students can also consider the audience for the work: where did the painting live? Who could see it? When and how did people see it? How was it used to inform or persuade them? The same tools of power and persuasion (or manipulation) that are the backdrop for these historical texts echo through the content distributed through social media today.

Big Takeaway

Visual texts in any media are powerful primary sources that support the rigor of curricula at any grade level. Diane Cordell, in her article "Rigor and Visual Literacy" explores several resources and toolkits for incorporating historical photographs into instructional materials. For more from Diane, check out "What Is Visual Literacy?", the first chapter of her book, Using Images to Teach Critical Thinking Skills. This practice is important for and accessible by students of all ages; Tom Bober shares an excellent lesson for elementary students using graphic novels to build literacy skills and foster insights that will resonate across disciplines and remain relevant as they grow up—real level four Depth of Knowledge stuff! Exercises like the ones explored here equip students to examine and unpack all sorts of visual sources when they are doing independent research and help students build the reflective capacity for understanding their own image consumption, creation and distribution.