Graphicacy - The Key To Visual Thinking In A Differentiated Classroom

In the scholastic world's quest to pinpoint new "literacies," one of the most essential skills in a student's toolkit isn't new at all. "Graphicacy" is the vital proficiency with visual inputs that all learners must master in the modern classroom. Graphicacy refers to the encoding and decoding of images, particularly in the close examination of details that construct visual meaning. It stands with literacy, oracy, and numeracy as one of the four indispensable corners of education.

Source: Christopher G. Healey

Graphicacy dates to W.G.V. Balchin's coinage of the term in the 1960s to identify the visual-spatial aspect of human intelligence. What began as a staple of South African geography education has ballooned in importance thanks to the onslaught of learning and entertainment media that all rely on optical displays. Especially in today's 1:1 classroom, with hand-held devices and ubiquitous smartphones, the understanding of visual patterns and pictorial cognition is imperative.

Graphicacy is about more than visual thinking. It is instead a careful roster of skills to comprehend diagrams, photographs, charts, logos, icons, maps, and picture books. With today's rightful emphasis on differentiated instruction, contemporary classrooms need to incorporate coaching in graphicacy to reach students via their learning preferences.

Source: Stephen Few

One key to guiding students in understanding graphs and drawings is teaching them about preattentive attributes. These are the visual marks that the mind's iconic perception unconsciously absorbs. Preattentive attributes are quickly discerned by the eye and rationalized by the brain to distinguish size, shape, color, and alignment. Visual designers employ preattentive attributes to make tables readable and logos memorable.

Stephen Few offers a clean, expert tutelage in the keys of preattentive attributes in "Tapping The Power Of Visual Perception." His graphic (above) presents some of the core distinguishing techniques used in both creating and interpreting images.

Source: Creative Bloq, via Alberto Cairo, The Functional Art

Another valuable graphic (above), which combines single attributes into coordinated displays, is featured in Graham Odds excellent explanation, "How To Design Better Data Visualizations," at the Creative Bloq. Taken from the work of William Cleveland and Robert McGill and published in Alberto Cairo's book, The Functional Art, this illustration is terrific for teachers to use as a tool in laying out the building blocks of visual comparisons. Students can apply the techniques of the optical continuum to decipher political cartoons, historical maps, and scientific displays. Dustin Smith also highlights the value of this graphical instruction at his superb blog.

To catch students' attentions and open their eyes to the power of subtle attributes, we recommend Jason Silva's masterful video, "To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns." In zippy, dynamic narration, Silva races through a visual blitz of naturally occurring frameworks and motifs. It's fascinating and mind-boggling for any viewer.

For further information about graphicacy, we suggest:

• Graphicacy = Visual Literacy + Visual Thinking 
• Graphicacy And Teaching The Art Of Seeing 
• Graphicacy: Infographics As Literacy
• Graphicacy: Deciphering The Code
• Graphicacy: The Neglected Fourth "R"
• Graphicacy In The Primary Grades
• Graphicacy: 4 Steps To Understanding An Image

The Secret Of "Enrichment" - Humanities For The Ages

Source: Humanities Enrichment

All parents want "enrichment" for their children. Kids, without knowing it, also crave enrichment, because it's the fun stuff, the hands-on exploratory stuff. Teachers, when they have the time and support, ache to offer students expansive investigations and motivating projects.

For many students, the classroom at times can seem dull, yet the Internet is their reliable playground. During recess, they huddle around laptops to watch YouTube videos, check sports highlights, and scope celebrity gossip. We admit that for us, the panoply of web media has taken on much the same enlightening distraction. The extraordinary graphics and nimble videos that we find via Twitter have filled our bookmarks and our evenings with professional wonder. Everyday we find something new that we want to share with our students. But when the realities of curricula, schedules, and assessments set in, we frequently can't find the "extra" time required to show supplemental maps or photographs or poems.

Source: Humanities Enrichment

Because of all the captivating online creations, and because our students latch on to visual resources, our History and English teachers in grades 5 - 8 joined together to assemble a website of self-directed learning. We created a Humanities Enrichment Tumblr page. Anything helpful or fascinating that we come across and that our students might find intriguing, we post on our page. Tumblr proved to be the ideal platform for quick, constantly updated posts that scroll easily through the days.

The goal of any enrichment is to enhance learning or add nuance to quotidian ideas. This kind of self-guided enrichment, where students can click on pictures that grab their attention and skip elements that seem bland, is valuable for learners along the spectrum of academic achievement and capability. It also offers a wonderful outlet to inspire a distracted child or a "bored" student. Additionally, enrichment pages are ideal for letting parents know that we as teachers are excited about providing their children with dynamic complements to the school day.

Source: Humanities Enrichment

We are strong believers in cross-curricular learning, so we teamed up with our English colleagues Gina Sipley and Barbara Thomas in cooperatively designing a joint page. We all want our students to recognize the intertwined nature of their Humanities studies. All four of us, therefore, post media about the blended worlds of social studies, language, geography, literature and cultural research.

Thanks to our favorite websites and our PLN, it's not hard to find links to display. So far, we've been able to post a new tidbit each school day. It's a great way to cultivate collaboration among fellow faculty members and to learn from the exciting resources each person unearths.

Each of us maintains the page link at the top of homework assignments and/or class websites. It turns out our students check the page regularly. They frequently remark in class about a fiction contest or antique map or financial infographic that appeared during the prior evening. Sometimes the humanities posts connect directly to what they're learning in class, but just as often, the snippets relate to current events or quirky scholarship.

Source: Humanities Enrichment

Please feel free to check out our Humanities Enrichment page for yourself. We've intentionally tried to keep it clean and simple and unassociated with any person or institution. Also, feel free to share it with your students. Because it features varied media such as animated clips, museum exhibits, and historical etchings, the page is hopefully relevant for any age group. Each item is something that caught our eye in the first place, so we think kids will find them curious as well.

Note: All images are sourced and linked on the Humanities Enrichment page.

Creativity Killers & Visualizing Different

The Anti-Creativity Checklist is one of those videos that hits home and requires no words to describe its powerful message about how to kill the creative spirit. It was published on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network in March 2010. The creator is Youngme Moon, a Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Her research focuses on the intersection of business, branding, and culture and how it affects marketing and strategy innovation. Perhaps the strongest message is that so many of the points made in the video are reflected in the bureaucratic approach to our current education system and the lack of forward thinking on the part of legislators and administrators to make changes.


The takeaways are clear: if we stick with the list of 14 points, so carefully depicted as a series of patterned statements followed by quotations that emphasize each one, we can systematically kill creativity. Maintaining the status quo is not good enough anymore. Our students need to compete in the marketplace for their future, and it requires us to change tactics to raise innovative and creative kids to be entrepreneurs.

Creativity is a necessity. Students need time to tinker, grapple, and ponder what they are learning to develop their imaginations, artistic abilities, and ingenuity. It's at the top of Bloom's Taxonomy and the key criteria in IBM's 2010 Global CEO Study. Countless other resources, from Ken Robinson's infamous TED talk on schools killing creativity to Tony Wagner's new book Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, support the idea for raising and not killing the creative spirit.  Without it, our kids will have an increasingly difficult time adapting to changes in a fast-paced, growing, complex world.

Source: Architizer

Education needs to differentiate itself from its routine, homogenized view for this century. It needs to be different, because kids learn differently. New schools look like old schools. Big deal, instead of black boards they have interactive whiteboards; most new schools haven’t taken a risk like a new one built in Stockholm designed without classrooms for today's kids. Now that breaks from the norm.

Youngme Moon addresses this, too, in her book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, about breaking with conformity. Her message:

"Get off the competitive treadmill that's taking you nowhere. Aspire to offer the world something that is meaningfully different-Different in a manner that is both fundamental and comprehensive."

The book trailer Youngme Moon produced for Different captures what it means to think differently in a mesmerizing visualization that in and of itself is creative. The design and clarity of the message to deliver her a point of view remind us of The Value of Visualization video from Column Five. Its straightforward and simplified delivery on being different is a powerful message and one we need to think about as educators.


We need to be forward thinking and not afraid to make the necessary changes for the world of learners we teach now. Technology changed the game rules, and if we don't watch out, we could be out of the game of school.