Over the Easter break, I gave considerable thought to the direction my Newsletter articles would take in Term 2. While the importance and value of reading was the focus for last term’s Literacy Links segment, this term’s focus will be on the other major literacy element, writing. The two activities of reading and writing are powerfully linked.

My plan for this week’s article was changed, however, after listening to last Sunday’s ABC radio program ‘Minefield’. Presented by journalists and academics Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, ‘Minefield’ negotiates the ethical dilemmas and complexities of modern life, often while exploring the power of language in its written, spoken, and visual forms. Sunday’s program was entitled ‘Disciplining the Eyes’. The two commentators discussed the power of images in our world and how they can corrupt our lives, clutter our vision, and spoil our imagination. This week’s program prompted my thinking.

Our contemporary culture is highly image-based. We are saturated with images. The study of visual texts – film, multimedia, photography, and paintings – occupies a prominent place in the teaching of English from Year 7 through to Year 12. The capacity to engage actively with the visual images that form part of our daily lives, requires an awareness of the ways these texts make meaning and influence and manipulate their audience. Like print texts, visual texts operate according to a set of conventions or codes which draw the viewer into the world of the text and influence their responses. In their acquisition and application of visual literacy skills, students learn to ‘read’ visual texts as they would ‘read’ print texts – alert to the range of ways that images operate and viewers interpret, discriminate and critique in the process of making meaning.

One of the most useful activities I incorporate in the classroom when students are responding to a visual text is to ask three questions: What do you see? What do you think? What do you wonder? Aside from encouraging students to analyse images using terms such as salience, gaze, foregrounding, and camera angles, I want them to think beyond the surface of the image and question its meaning-making ‘power’.

In a world saturated with pictures, we need to promote a visual literacy which will encourage critical thinking and an intelligent and discerning ‘reading’ of images. The ‘Minefield’ commentators last Sunday spoke of language as a form of moral encounter. They highlighted the importance of all of us ‘seeing the world more clearly’. Given the problematic nature of social media, the constant exposure to images depicting global conflict such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even the election process currently underway in our own country, the importance of visual literacy is critical. I will finish with a quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil: ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’. Attending carefully to the images which now pervade our contemporary world, is something we are all called to do.

Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach