My little brother had an assignment to design a musical instrument over the weekend. As I was helping him create the instrument and come up with a song I realized that music would be really hard to compose for one who isn’t visually literate. He had to visualize each of the symbols and think of what it is that they stood for and then draw them to write his song.
It is so fascinating to me that every day I discover something new that I had never associated with visual literacy before. Just this morning I was watching the weather report and images are used so much. They are universal images that we all understand and for the most part seem to associate them with the same thing. The stimulation of rain falling is pretty much the same so even if the weatherman wasn’t talking at all we would be able to understand what was going on. That would also explain why it is that whenever my grandparents (who speak no English at all) came to visit us here they would only watch the weather reports.
Earlier I mentioned that visual symbols are all over and that the struggle is being able to train your eyes to notice them. I don’t think that it’s a matter of training your eyes anymore. I have come to realize that I don’t appreciate them which is why I haven’t been able to notice them. By looking at everything and practicing visual literacy (thinking about what message the image is trying to convey) it would be hard to miss any symbols!
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