Introduction to literacy in Visual Arts

This section is focused on literacy in Visual Communication Design (VCD).

The information and resources address the reading and viewing, writing, and creating and speaking and listening modes across the VCD curriculum.

Literacy in Visual Arts and visual literacy

Literacy in Visual Arts is different from visual literacy, although these concepts are interconnected.

Literacy in Visual Arts refers to:

• literate practices and strategies that enable individuals to understand, synthesise and communicate about artists, artworks, audiences and art practices, and the relationship between them
• the reading, viewing, writing, creating, speaking, and listening practices that students use to access, understand, and communicate in visual arts.

Visual literacy involves:

• interpreting and making meaning from still and moving image texts, including artworks, advertisements, posters, graphics, animations, film clips, web pages and more
• developing knowledge and understanding of visual sign systems, relationships between modes and texts, and ways of knowing in a visual culture
• interpreting and making meaning from a range of inter-and multi-cultural, multi-textual, multi-meaning and multi-modal visual representations.

Literate demands in Visual Arts education

In Visual Arts enable students, must

• develop their aesthetic understanding of artworks, artists, and audiences 
• plan and create visual artworks
• interpret and communicate their ideas about their own artworks and that of others.

To do this, students must be able to

• use Visual Arts language in their expression of concepts, analysis, and critique
• articulate ideas and processes behind their own artworks and the artworks of others
• decode, make-meaning and evaluate artworks using their understandings of semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and art elements and principles
• apply these skills and understandings to conceptualise and produce their own artworks
• develop their literacy capabilities through practice as they make, see, design, create, curate, and explore ideas and concepts.

Knowing how to read and view visual, material, and cultural images, for example, facilitates students’ critical and creative thinking. To make and respond through practice includes the ability to interpret, infer, connect, explain, reflect, and story, all integral to knowing in Visual Arts.

Using targeted literacy teaching strategies in Visual Arts, teachers support students to:

• use the vocabulary and specialist language of Visual Arts with reference to context and culture
• apply this language, orally, in writing, and multimodally in students’ responses to, analysis and creation of artworks
• think and respond critically and creatively with reference to principles of “power, ideology, representation, seduction, gaze, intertextuality, and multimodality” (Duncum, 2010, p.6).

Increasingly, visual artworks are inter-and multi-cultural, multi-textual, multi-meaning and multi-modal visuals. In other words, artworks are complex as they have multiple layers of communication. Explicitly teaching students about the ways to read, observe, see, decode, reconstruct and know about the world through production, presentation and consumption (Harris, 2006) in Visual Arts assists them to build capacity for critically engaging as artist and audience.
Once students have developed these skills to talk about and analyse visual artworks, they need to be able to create a range of genres and text types, including:

• informative texts, such as procedures, reports, and explanations
• persuasive texts, such as expositions and discussions
• interpretative responses (ACARA, n.d.).

Literacy in the Victorian Curriculum: Visual Arts

Literate practices are embedded in the aims of the Victorian Curriculum: Visual Arts. The curriculum aims to ensure that students:

• communicate, challenge, and express their own and others' ideas
• develop 'critical reasoning' skills
• use, apply and problem-solve using visual language
• engage with visual arts through making, viewing, discussing, analysing, interpreting, and evaluating
• 'view, discuss and evaluate the characteristics of artworks from different cultures, locations and periods of time'
• discover new ways of representing and expressing their observations, ideas and imagination
• 'use critical analysis to refine their own artistic endeavours' (VCAA, 2017).

The Visual Arts curriculum is structured around four strands:

• Explore and Express Ideas
• Visual Arts Practices
• Present and Perform
• Respond and Interpret.

Within each strand, students must develop distinct literate practices to make and respond to media artworks. Students undertake reading and viewing, writing, and speaking and listening to:

• explore, experiment with, and communicate ideas about their artworks
• develop an understanding of skills, techniques, technologies, and processes in Visual Arts practices
• create, exhibit, discuss and analysis visual artworks
• analyse, evaluate, interpret, and reflect upon visual artworks (VCAA, n.d.).