English Studies

There is broad consensus among scholars that our culture is more visual than ever before. High school or college students, among other groups, inevitably need to access images for their daily lives. However, teaching the language used by these images continues to be largely ignored as an issue in academia. Despite finding ourselves immersed in a veritable audiovisual abyss, the learning of this grammar is conspicuously absent and undervalued as an area of knowledge, like writing, that may be taught and learned. Teaching Visual Literacy is the title of a work, edited recently in the United States by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, which seeks to approach this specific need. Professors at San Diego State University, with years of teaching experience, international prizes and books related to education, Frey and Fisher assemble a compilation of various articles written by and for specialists in the so called realm of “visual literacy”. Throughout the book, they seek to provide a series of strategies to help increase students ’ involvement in the classroom through rarely used tools, such as illustrated books, manga comics, graphic novels, anime films and other visual sources of information