Asia Rising and Yellow Promise/Yellow Peril Curriculum
by Kathy Krauth: Introduction
Visual Literacy: A Must for the 21st Century
Current discussions and debates in education essentially revolve around how best to create literate individuals. Most educators worldwide would agree that basic desired literacy means students acquire the necessary skills to comprehend meaning in texts and then be able to produce their own meaningful texts.
Texts. Do you “picture” a printed page, a book, or written document? Discussions of literacy are framed almost exclusively by written texts, for this is the only literacy in which most teachers were educated. However, those same educators now live, work, and function in a very visual society, a society in which the idea of being visually literate still remains peripheral to mainstream discussions and accepted definitions of the educated person.
Visual literacy must be made central to current discussions and definitions of the literate individual in modern society. Recent educational studies estimate that we now acquire almost half of our knowledge through visual texts. The current generation—those that we teach—has been labeled as the “visual” generation, a label that would assume a minimal literacy in the visual. Yet only a few educators in secondary education acknowledge the reality of 21st-century acquisition of knowledge by actually teaching visual literacy.
The following lessons, as part of the MIT Visualizing Cultures Web site, are based on the premise that visual literacy is an absolute requirement for the students we are currently educating. Visual literacy here is simple and two-fold: first it is the ability to assign and understand meaning in visual texts; secondly, it is the ability to produce meaning through one’s own visual texts. Each of these lessons addresses and engages teachers and students in either the interpretation of meaning of visuals and/or the production of one’s own meanings through visuals.
These lessons offer a juncture of visual literacy and important historical content. Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905 was a turning point not only for Japan and Asia, but also the world. Since it was the first time a major Asian country defeated a European country, the global balance of power shifted. In addition, all major nations closely observed the fighting, and some were involved in helping to finance it. For the first time, people throughout the world were able to visualize a major war, either through photographs or through postcards. What they were viewing and how perceptions of peoples, nations, and cultures were altered through these lenses is the focus of this curriculum unit.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2008 Visualizing Cultures