Lost Literacy

Abstract

Our society is dominated by imagery. From television to films to magazines to the internet--we are saturated with it. Yet, in schools, many educators persist in teaching a one-dimensional concept of literacy, while students learn to negotiate their out-of-school experiences with images via informal, ad hoc methods picked up from personal trial and error, peers, and from the media itself. Educators inadvertently neglect, devalue, and/or misuse images due to an ideological (and subsequently naturalized) preference for print literacy. (1) James Gee argues this preference is not validated scientifically, but socioculturally. (2) It is necessary for someone to be able to read and write in order to fill out a job application; therefore, print literacy is beneficial in our society. Conversely, if it were requisite for a person to be able to interpret and create art to get a job, then visual literacy would be the preferred mode of literacy. Implied in this argument is the neglect of visual literacy, i.e., the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from, and with, images. (3) This definition offers us a point from which to explore the commonalities between print and visual literacies, since print literacy also involves interpreting, negotiating, and making meaning from text, i.e., reading comprehension. (4) Developing skills in visual literacy considerably augments a person's ability to interpret his or her world by providing additional modes of making meaning. When students are denied a balanced literacy repertoire, the possibility of learning to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from media (practices used with more frequency than those of print literacy because they are more relevant to their daily lives) is arrested. (5) I do not advocate a rejection of print literacy, but rather, an acknowledgement that it is one of many literacies necessary to make meaning from our lived experiences. The graphic novel is a medium through which both print and visual literacy can be taught. VISUAL ILLITERACY Perceptual psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim argued that over time, society has come to overvalue cognition at the expense of perception. (6) For Arnheim, cognition is the mind's manipulation of concepts resulting from direct perception of objects, people, images, etc. (7) He contends that cognition is bound to perception; therefore, historically determined dichotomies between seeing and thinking, perception and reason, are damaging to full cognitive development. According to Arnheim, verbal language, which has come to represent cognition and imagery, tends to be perceptual and is deficient in the sense that the verbal is actually an abstracted aural symbol that, lacks a referent. For example, the printed word does not visually resemble a cat (the image lacks any consistent symbol, i.e., a cat is a because it is identified as such via language). (8), (9) In order to cognitively process the idea of cat, we must have an idea of what a cat looks like. In order to conceive such concepts, a person must create a visual representation utilizing symbolic imagery. Therefore, verbal language and visual imagery are complementary and provide what the other lacks. This relationship strengthens both the perception and the resultant cognition. Arnheim claims that once this connection is realized the need for art to have a central role in general education will be evident. (10) In the meantime, he contends that the dismissal of perception, and subsequently of the visual, has resulted in visual illiteracy, (11) a claim more recently echoed by Luc Pauwels. (12) Visual illiteracy has been detrimental to countless students who have been made to ignore perception at the cost of their cognitive development, and ultimately their success in school and society. A book is one method of delivering symbolic communication, yet it has become the dominant method within schools. (13) Graphic novels can aid in correcting the disequilibrium between print and visual literacy in the classroom. …