Graphicacy: The Neglected Fourth “R”

With all the visuals in the media today, we assume that most adults bring a certain level of graphicacy to interpret the information they see; however, what about children and their graphicacy skills? Their textbooks, magazines and much of their media world is filled with visualizations of one kind or another. Graphicacy, today more than any other period in history, is crucial to understanding and deciphering information for the 21st century and is often neglected as literacy in schools. As educators, we cannot assume that students can read images, know the language to construct meaning, and interpret visualizations without instruction. Critical thinking is no less a part of graphicacy than it is to any other literacy. It needs to be harnessed by teachers into all content areas beginning at the elementary level as an essential component for deciphering information.

If we stop and think about it, one of the first things children come across in a graphical form is a picture book. Perhaps this is why picture books are so important for children. They help them develop critical thinking skills to make connections between words and images as well as to wonder, anticipate or predict what happens next. Take the book One, by Kathryn Otoshi; it is perhaps the simplest in terms of graphics, but one of the most powerful books about bullying. It's clear, strong message about standing up for oneself and others through the use of simple colored dots for characters visually holds the reader’s attention to convey a strong message. Read this to a group of middle school students and what begins as laughter turns into a powerful WOW. Graphically, it is simple, but just like any advertisement, the carefully constructed relationship between size, shape and color are deliberate. Why is the character of Red the bully and not green, or why is Blue the bullied and not yellow?

In their work, “Graphicacy: the Fourth ‘R’” (2000), F. Aldrich and L. Sheppard point out that graphicacy is rarely taught explicitly and it is often assumed children will pick it up along the way. They make a strong case for teaching it as a learned skill, just like any other skill that needs to be taught. With the current craze in using visualizations, particularly infographics, the need to incorporate graphicacy as an important facet of learning is even more vital. Without it, students will not develop a discerning eye to interpret the flood of visualizations in the media. Infographics by definition are supposed to represent complex data and information quickly and clearly, but not without the learned skill to decode them. Moreover, they may not be able to critically analyze the data for accuracy, make connections without prior knowledge, or verbally express how the graphic is unclear or confusing. By integrating graphicacy into all content areas of the curriculum, children will acquire the skills they need to understand the ever-growing mounds of information designed to engage the eye.

See also:
Graphicacy Resources
Designing Information: The Need for Graphicacy
Other posts on graphicacy

Visualizing Language and Literature

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Language, by its definition, is the attempt to give voice to what the eye perceives. Writers and poets for centuries have carefully weighed the visual appearance of their words. Classic calligraphers and 20th-century modernists have all valued the look of language in presenting their art. Indeed, the fundamental purpose of a stanza or paragraph is to add clarity through organization and structure. Poets such as George Herbert and e.e. cummings took layout a step further in developing "painted" or “concrete” pictorial layouts as their drivers of meaning.

For novelists, design can play an integral role in communicating subtext and point of view, from James Joyce’s Ulysses, which conceives a whole chapter in the style of newspaper headlines, to Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, which paints stylized, ever-changing room decors to parallel its idiosyncratic language. One of children's favorite poetic devices, the acrostic, defines itself by visual layout. Asemic writing represents the other pole, where language becomes abstract in favor of artistic design.

In English classes, or in any course that emphasizes word choice, there are many engaging resources to add life to text. These can help reinforce the core concepts of design, literacy, information, and thinking (D-LIT). The visualization tools at Many Eyes, for example, provide great ways to add graphic sense to words. An experiment from IBM, Many Eyes supplies easy-to-use instruments, ranging from bubble charts to pie graphs to scatter plots to network diagrams. The word trees, tag clouds, and phrase nets work particularly well for revealing connections within poetic verses and offering writers' words in new contexts.

Source: Lee Byron

Poetry Visualizations, from Jeff Clark's Neoformix blog, discusses colors and connections that can link related vocabulary. In that vein, Clark created Document Arc Diagrams, which adapts Martin Wattenberg’s musical scales and offers an interactive tool to paint rainbowed connections between repeated words. Clark also refers to Lee Byron’s amazing Children’s Poetry and Limerick Visualization, which displays rhyme, rhythms, alliteration, and homophones in harmonious curves.

Two other resources are Snappy Words and Visual Thesaurus. Snappy Words is a free, online dictionary that reveals connections between vocabulary words and suggests relationships of meaning through pictorial connections. For homework, students are regularly assigned to look up vocab words. Snappy Words supplies definitions but also acts as a graphic thesaurus for writers and a derivative menu for foreign languages. Visual Thesaurus sprouts verbal connections in a similar way, by stemming synonyms in an appealing and practical floral pattern. Also useful from the Thinkmap team is Vocab Grabber, which examines a section of text and displays the frequency, relevance, and color-coded subject of key words in the selection.


Among tools for the iPad and iPod, the Visual Poet app unites words and images in photo collages. On Flickr, poetry visualizations come to life with unique pictures and language. And for experimenting with language and fonts, Type Is Art allows you to manipulate the 21 distinctive parts of letter forms to create art and graphics.

Finally, Literature Map attempts to recommend writers that a person might enjoy. After typing in a name, Literature Map delivers a spatial proximity of similar (and non-similar) authors. The algorithm attempts to produce word clouds, like SpicyNode, Tagul, and others, but the design is somewhat medieval. Each name links to a brief discussion forum about that writer, but ultimately, Literature Map is a thin resource. The graphic interface does not reveal any genuine information and does not yet use its visual tools to enhance understanding along the D-LIT continuum.

Source: Literature Map

Designing Information for Media Literacy

Media literacy is learning how to analyze and interpret media messages by questioning what you listen to, see, watch, or read, from paper to the digital world. It is also about designing information. The purpose of advertising is to convey a message in order to sell a good or service. These messages are constructed, so why not make our teaching tools as catchy and effective as advertising? The tools to design eye-catching images for visual learners can be incorporated into the creation and can debunk the idea of the “boring” worksheet. In other words, simple design elements can attract students to learning in the same way advertisers attract buyers for their products.

As part of our media literacy program that starts in the second grade, students are introduced to the topic of branding with the worksheet you see here. The document design includes 28 individual letters from different company names. The purpose of the activity is to promote an awareness of how important branding matters to a particular institution, and how the mere showing of a letter triggers a visual identification with a particular good or service.

Some of the letters are obvious and are easily recognizable, while others are not. For some students, it becomes a game or bragging right, for who can identify the most companies correctly. For others, it is a little uncomfortable not knowing as much. Herein lies the lesson. Which is better, to know more or less? For the students who have more than two-thirds of the answers, they become aware that perhaps they are more influenced by the media than they thought. Whereas the students who knew less realize that perhaps it is a good thing they are not as influenced by brand identification. What seemed like a deficit was actually a plus.

The point, however, is that well-designed worksheets are not work. Designing the information on a document attracts students to participate in the same way that a carefully crafted image of corporate identity attracts its customers. The students clamor for more, so we keep designing new ones and strategically putting them out for the taking. In a sense, they are advertised, free and fun to do.

Food For Thought

Motivation leads to action as questioning leads to awareness. We will better equip our students to participate as active citizens if we push them to make choices, encourage them to be selective, and engage them at all levels to participate in their own learning. Questioning is key, and it starts with "so what?"

Choice, Empowerment, and So What?

Seven years ago, we started an eighth-grade independent research project affectionately known as the IRP. The objectives for the project were to create a sense of independence and self-direction for students in a limited time frame and to build on the inherent value of “choice” in students’ self-guided learning. It was the sense of choice that empowered them to feel motivated and passionate about what they were learning. The original IRP project focused on areas within the American History curriculum but has since evolved into the IRP World with an emphasis on global change. We have presented the elements of this project at both the National Council for the Social Studies (2009) and the National Middle School Association (2010).

Design: ASIDE, 2011

The success of the project is largely based on the power of choice. Students get to pick the topic for their learning, design how they want to orally present the information to their peers using technology tools such as Prezi, and create an engaging handout with select information as an overview for their classmates. There is a direct connection between choice and empowerment that we continually see in the effort and focus they give to this project. Without a doubt, the students are motivated by a sense of purpose. They see an opportunity to work autonomously and take the responsibility of independence seriously.

The article, “The Responsibility Breakthrough” by ReLeah Cossett Lent in Educational Leadership (ASCD September 2010), builds a case around the idea of motivating students through responsibility. The author cites the work of Australian educator Brian Cambourne who maintains that there are eight conditions for literacy development. One of them is responsibility. For Cambourne, learners who do not have control over making their own decisions become disempowered. Lent also refers to Daniel Pink’s latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and here, too, she points out how Pink’s ideas about mastery, autonomy and purpose are the factors that create responsibility.

Design: ASIDE, 2011

The last component of the project, or the “so what?,” is not only the most important part of the process, but also the hardest part for our students to grapple with in their research. We want them to ask the question, “so what?” It is not the event itself that they report on, but its impact. How does it relate to change in that region of the world, whether societal, financial or otherwise? This project is not about straight reporting. Instead, it is built around the “so what?,” and they need to have this message clearly stated in their thesis.

In his work, “Encouraging Critically Engaged Citizens: So What?" (Independent School 2011), Mark Piechota pushes his students to develop the habit of questioning with the clear purpose of making engaged citizens who do not just passively accept issues as delivered by the media. Empowering students with the habit of asking “so what?” will ultimately help develop a keener sense of the world around them. Like Lent and Piechota, we want our students to take ownership over the design of their ideas and learning.

Design: ASIDE, 2011

The Twitter Tech Bubble

Among all of the emerging formats in which to view Twitter feeds, one of the best is Tweet Topic Explorer. Created in April by Jeff Clark, Tweet Topic Explorer synthesizes a person’s recent tweets and produces a clever graphic aggregator of frequently used words. The color-coded cluster diagram offers a dynamic way to see what topics a person regularly mentions. The display is interactive as well. Clicking on any bubble will highlight on the right the tweets in which the word appears. Here is the bubble cluster for @theASIDEblog:

Source: Tweet Topic Explorer, by Jeff Clark at Neoformix

Michele Bachmann - Designing A Candidacy

The marketing of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign is built around her own persona. Her headshot is featured prominently in her website banner and in every facet of her media offerings, just as her name is festooned across her midnight blue campaign bus.

Source: Bachmann For President

Overall, Bachmann offers one of the best presentations in this year’s Republican crop. Her pieces of messaging all connect to the same leitmotif, to an unmistakable values-centered image of yesteryear. Her distinctive seal features the classic Americana emblem of corner stars with a bordered last name. While seemingly unremarkable, the logo’s thin lettering etched vividly on a white background serves to elevate Bachmann’s status in subtle ways. The elements create a convincing dressing of establishment for a three-term Representative. The logo conjures heartland memories and suggests permanence for a politician relatively new to the national scene. Her design looks like it should be painted on the side of a barn, sentimentally appealing to Iowa caucus goers. Her crest is at once nostalgic and reminiscent of lettering on a quadrangle’s gazebo, above a marching band’s scalloped bunting.

The “H” in her name is emphasized, in a nice, uplifting banner wave, but the branding oddly singles out a middle letter rather than a marquee initial. Still, Jon Huntsman would have been better served to mimic Bachmann’s optimistic and distinctive “H,” rather than his disjointed Tribeca block lettering.

Bachmann succeeds where others falter, because her campaign understands the message it seeks to convey and, therefore, uses its visual components to reinforce these subtle communiqués. A design should be inseparable from a candidate’s persona. In this regard, Bachmann is ahead of the pack.

Check out our other posts about design and education in the 2012 election.