Teaching visual literacies: The case of The Great American Dust Bowl

Teachers and students require a range of tools to engage with visual texts. Using The Great American Dust Bowlby Don Brown (2013) as an exemplar text, we outline four conceptions of visual literacy: rhetorical, instructional, industrial and visuo-spatial and discuss their use in our literacy education practice. In addition, we provide a brief model of a second text, The Arrival (Tan, 2013) and a list of suggested texts for students at different levels (elementary, middle, and high school). We argue that these tools have the potential to deepen conceptions of visual literacies and empower teachers and students to understand the many ways in which visual texts operate to send message and evoke response and engagement

Breaking the rules [of summer]

Shaun Tan’s picture book/app, Rules of Summer, challenges conceptions of literature and literacy for young people, placing visuals at the center of the narrative in dissonance with printed text. This article explores this nonlinear, yet complex text and reactions to it from preservice and practicing teachers. We explore possibilities for schools, particularly with considering intersections between art education and literacy. We believe teachers can use artful texts like Rules of Summer in interdisciplinary ways to challenge their students, and themselves, to break rules around instruction, literacy practices, art education, and the current testing culture. We find that this narrative invites discomfort and (not) knowing in ways that also challenge traditional ways of literacy teaching, while inviting all readers to question and even break the rules

Teaching visual literacies: The case of The Great American Dust Bowl

Teachers and students require a range of tools to engage with visual texts. Using The Great American Dust Bowlby Don Brown (2013) as an exemplar text, we outline four conceptions of visual literacy: rhetorical, instructional, industrial and visuo-spatial and discuss their use in our literacy education practice. In addition, we provide a brief model of a second text, The Arrival (Tan, 2013) and a list of suggested texts for students at different levels (elementary, middle, and high school). We argue that these tools have the potential to deepen conceptions of visual literacies and empower teachers and students to understand the many ways in which visual texts operate to send message and evoke response and engagement