We should close the debate over the concept of visual literacy and do something about its implementation in education. I draw this conclusion by actually coming back to the roots of visual literacy movement and Fransecky and Debes’s (1972, p. 5) call: ‘If you really want to understand visual literacy, you will have to do something about it’.
In my recently published article: “What does it mean to be visually literate? Examination of visual literacy definitions in a context of higher education”, I intended to avoid either compiling a corpus of visual literacy definitions or advancing its theory. Instead, I selected several visual literacy definitions that can be useful for education practitioners, particularly within university education. The selection includes both the more established as well as some recent definitions. I further aimed to translate them into concrete learning and teaching objectives. As a result, I constructed lists of skills (abilities, competencies) that a visually literate individual should be able to demonstrate.
The figure below shows three categories of visual literacy skills with thematic groups of skills, based on the review of eleven visual literacy definitions published between 1969 and 2013.
