Using Educational Video in the Classroom Theory, Research and Practice

Visual Literacy 
When he coined the term “visual literacy” in 1969, John Debes explained that it 
“refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the 
same time having and integrating other sensory experience. The development of these 

---

13
competencies is fundamental to normal human learning” (cited in International Visual 
Literacy Association, no date). In the concise definition of the Visual Literacy Program 
of Pomona College, visual literacy “means the skills and learning needed to view visual 
and audio-visual materials skeptically, critically and knowledgably” (Stonehill, no date). 
Teaching students to become visually literate implies perceiving video in the classroom 
not merely as a conveyor of content knowledge, but also as a learning object productive 
of its own visual meanings.
In a study of elementary students in Australia, Callow (2006) concluded that 
students’ intuitive understanding of such visual elements as color, salience and layout 
needed to be scaffolded through explicit instruction: while “many students have some 
understanding of visual features, …this is not developed into a richer systematic 
understanding, where similar concepts might be transferred to other literacy tasks.” In his 
review of the relevant literature, Callow found a lack of substantial research and 
documentation of “both the metalanguage of visual texts and the pedagogy for teaching 
about them,” indicating that this is an area where further work is required.
Teaching students to become visually-literate consumers of media also develops 
their abilities to produce their own multimedia objects, literate as both “readers” and 
“writers” in a visual language. While historically, research and resources have been more 
focused on the development of print literacy, the development of visual literacy is in fact 
a means of supporting more traditionally defined literacy: the application of visual 
literacy skills will assist students not only “[to] critique their own visual products, but 
also … to interrogate other texts to explore intended audience, purpose, emotional effect 
and ideological positions” (New London Group, cited in Callow, 2006). “Although visual 

---

14
literacy is surely valuable for its own sake, its potential broader ramifications lend 
additional urgency to the argument for visual education” (Messaris, 2001).