One of the most important things that I learned is that visual literacy has many benefits. Incorporating the arts in everyday schooling not only enhances the learning experience of the students but it also decreases drop-out rates and gets them genuinely interested in what they are studying. Also, it gives them things to focus on outside of school, as we saw a few weeks ago in the after-school program that provided students with technologies and equipment to take pictures, make music, make movies, whatever it is that they love to do.
I took several art classes in high school which were, obviously, very related to visual literacy and art. We had several projects where we would have to take a song or a piece of writing and convert it into something visual. Some of my teachers were very good at involving visual literacy into our every-day class. For example, I had a history teacher my sophomore year that had us make a children’s storybook about the Protestant Reformation. My group had an absolute heyday with that project. And because of the way in which we had to learn about it, through creating an illustrations book and short story, I remember a lot about it now, three years later.
In my future career, I will be working with children that have varying degrees of hearing loss. Many of these children will be in speech therapy which involves a lot of interactive games and drawing, making pictures, et cetera. Also, a large portion of my job will involve testing these patients to see how good/bad their hearing is. Many of the tests involve playing games and connecting words to pictures. Both sides of Communication Sciences and Disorders- audiology and speech pathology- involve connecting what you see to what you hear and forming associations between the two.
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I am also a Communication Sciences and Disorders major, and I agree that connecting words to pictures is an important part of this discipline. Do you think that speech pathologists and audiologists will be effected by the shift in our society away from text and towards visual media? How will these professions be affected by these shifts in learning, and how can they teach their clients visual literacy skills?
I think that the shift from text to visual media could be a good thing in regard to speech pathology and audiology. I think that, if anything, it will help make verbal therapy that much easier and make it easier for them to learn. Especially if their hearing loss or disability is severe and they have difficulty reading or hearing, being able to connect the sounds that they hear in therapy as well as in everyday life to pictures. Then they might be able to learn faster.