If a picture's worth a thousand words, why don't we teach visual literacy?

• As we tweet, blog, sms, drive, watch television, movies, commercials, etc. need to create effective verbal and visual messages and we have to be able to critically evaluate the messages we are bombarded with.
• When marketing ourselves, our skills, our ideas, our businesses, we create visual and verbals messages: Business cards, billboards, advertisements, blogs, tweets and IMs ALL have visual and verbal representations!
• Socially - at work, play and in school, we need to read faces of other kids and adults to fully understand how to effectively interact with and respond to others.

 
Interestingly (at least to me), while the term "visual literacy" is credited to Jack Debes, co-founder of the International Visual Literacy Association around 1969, it did not come across my radar as a school psychologist and educator until very recently. Similarly, while Mary Alice White, a researcher at Columbia University's Teacher's College has found that kids learn more than half of what they know from visually presented mediums, few schools consciously teach students how to evaluate and think critically about visual data. In fact, until VERY recently, there was little or no emphasis on visual literacy.

For strategies, websites and books to help you and your child develop visual literacy skills please come to my blog for specific details: http://departingthetext.blogspot.com