Organic Food: A Lesson In Information Literacy

Source: Food Tech Connect

As we head into the throws of the summer and the coming onslaught of fresh produce from local growers hitting the markets, we thought it might be helpful to provide a little information literacy into the world of organic foods. We’ve long taught our students to read the nutrition labels to compare serving size, fat content, ingredients, and more using real props such as cereal boxes. But now that organic food has become mainstream in supermarket chains, it makes sense to educate our students about organics as well.

Since this is a multi-billion dollar industry today, we want our learners to know what it means to be organic, whether it is safer to eat, what are the nutrition facts, and how to read food labels. The motion graphic What Is Organic Food from Epipheo is a good resource to start with to help students understand organic foods and, more importantly, that just because something is organic, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for you, healthy, or nutritious.


As the video points out, organic chicken nuggets, mac ‘n cheese, or sandwich cookies can still be considered “junk food” without pesticides. It is how the food is created, prepared or raised without chemicals, genetically modified organisms, or radiation in the process. These are just a few examples. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily mean that ingredients are nutritious, just that the ingredients are organic.

Source: Foododdity (detail)

Source: USDA Organic Progra

If we want our kids to be smart consumers, they need to know who gets to use the USDA Organic label. The infographic "What Does Organic Really Mean?" provides a clear layout to explain who can use it. Only food where a minimum of 95% of the ingredients are organic can use the seal. Food that is between 70-94% organic cannot put the label on its products.

Marketing and packaging of food is no different from any other industry trying to sell its products. A little media literacy goes a long way in helping kids, and adults, make healthy choices. The Mayo Clinic’s page on nutrition and healthy eating gives a short overview of the real difference between organic foods and their traditional counterparts as to nutrition, safety and price. It makes a point that “organic” is not interchangeable with “natural.” Other terms that can also be misleading to consumers are “all natural,” “free range,” or “hormone-free.” These products are not organic.

Lastly, many consumers, let alone kids, are not aware of what those little stickers mean on every piece of produce we purchase. They are called “price look up codes," or PLUs. However annoying these little stickers might be, they provide valuable information about the food we're buying. So it makes sense to help students know what these numbers mean. The simple graphic called “Learn Your Labels” explains it all. If the produce is organic, the five digit code starts with a 9, if it is a genetically modified organism (GMO) an 8, and if it is conventionally grown a 4.

Source: Royal Hawaiian Orchards

Information and media literacy are important aspects of the learning process and equally so in making healthy choices. Anytime we can add to the overall knowledge of consumer information for our students, the wiser they become about scrutinizing the world around them.

For other infographics, please take a look at:

• Fruits, Veggies, and Pesticides
• Farm to Fork: The Story Of Our Toxic Food System

Graphicacy: 4 Steps To Understanding An Image

It’s easy to recommend that students learn how to decipher an image. It’s harder to explain the specific steps of instruction that can help children comprehend the pictures they encounter.

P.D. Wilmot (1999) cites Dale’s and Seel’s (1994) earlier works in outlining methods of graphic communication. They point toward understanding literal meaning, inferring between the lines, and applying ideas in one’s own voice.

In our classes, we've used similar practices. Our approaches toward elementary and middle school learners have tried to be clear and systematic. Here are two formats that we’ve used successfully for several years in analyzing political cartoons and in questioning media advertisements.

Typically, we move through four steps in guiding students to interpret charts, maps, cartoons, infographics, and logos. These four steps progress from base-level identification toward more analytical and sophisticated skills. The understandings proceed from: 1) Substance, 2) Scaffold, 3) Story, and 4) So What?

By “Substance,” we mean the literal things that appear in an image. Regardless of meaning or significance, what actual items do we see? Is that a bear and a honey pot, a continent and an ocean, or a curved line and an arrow? Are there words or numbers in the picture? By listing all of the details, we can be sure that we’ve noticed all the necessary pieces before beginning to determine what they might mean.

“Scaffold” refers to how the image is constructed. What structures define the picture as a graph, or a map, or a painting? What are the relationships between the details? For example, is there a grid, or an x/y axis, or a table of rows and columns? Are there cartoon people of different sizes between a title and a caption? Are there percentages connected by flow-chart arrows? Are there lines of latitude and longitude? Are there keys or legends explaining the color-coding? Are there markings or symbols or abbreviations? By defining the type of image and its construction, we can identify how the details unite to create a meaning.

“Story” is the message or the meaning of an image. In other words, what is a picture trying to tell us? What is the opinion of the cartoonist or the narrative of the illustration? What is the take-away from the pie graph or the point of the cause-and-effect comparison? The “story” is the purpose of the military map or the corporate logo. It is the overall meaning of the graphic.

Finally, “So What?” emphasizes an image’s importance. Who cares? Why is the graphic valuable? What deeper significance can we construe? How can we put the image in its proper historical, financial, or media context? How can we glean ideas to apply in our own lives or in other situations? Why would we waste time examining this particular image? What are the larger, interesting conclusions to infer from this unique picture?

Graphicacy in the Primary Grades

Whether graphicacy is the “fourth R” or the “third skill” as Howard A. Spielman refers to it, the format for representing data and visuals is much more complex today. Data visualizations such as infographics and the myriad of designs used in their creation are arguably more complex in many cases. This is quite the opposite of what infographics are by definition, which is to present complex information quickly and clearly. They often combine images and data in ways very different from standard graphs, charts and maps in most elementary textbooks, thus prompting a need for graphicacy in education. To quote Spielman:

“Appropriate skills build upon a foundation of graphic symbols and a system with rules and syntax, assuring clear graphic input and output communication, just as literacy and numeracy represent similar linguistic and quantitative skills.”

For Spielman, graphicacy should be considered a core competency just as literacy and numeracy, and  children need to formally learn these skills in the primary grades to give them competitive advantages in a world full of graphical information. Building a foundation in these skills into the curriculum will help children develop a common language for graphic communication, an understanding of design, and a way to more accurately represent data. The daily use of graphical devices and images to create visualizations will not be as readable without having learned the skills to do so.

As it was mentioned in an earlier post on graphicacy, authors F. Aldrich and L. Sheppard, like Spielman, maintain that if there are gaps in understanding the various symbols for interpretation or if they are not explicitly taught and reinforced, then gaps in knowledge, misinterpretation of data, and confusion of meaning increase. It should also not be assumed that children have the skills to construct meaning of views, forms, and commentary without being taught these skills explicitly. Things we take for granted as adults, such as cross-sections, changes in scale, or distant views, are not necessarily viewed the same way by children. At a young age, their views are much more literal, leading to misunderstandings of what they see.

Source: Aldrich and Sheppard (2000)

Commentary objects, too, such as lines and arrows, can also be misunderstood by young children to be part of a graphic, especially if they are not given prior knowledge explaining why they are included. For example, drawings showing emotion, such as trembling or excitement, often include commentary lines to help express those emotions. You cannot actually see these objects radiating from a figure expressing emotion, and children learn that early on reading in picture books. Likewise, when viewing graphical information, lines can indicate movement, sound, or light, and arrows can label, indicate direction, or show sequencing. Aldrich and Sheppard point out that without instruction to learn how commentary objects are used, young children take them to be a literal part of the graphic and do not see them as separate. We have only to look at the various types of graphic information in children’s textbooks to see the variations and inconsistencies to realize how these could cause confusion if not given graphicacy instruction.

As teachers, there are a host of resources for designing graphical information, such as ManyEyes or Chartle.Net to name a few. Our resource page has many helpful links. The most important thing, however, is to include as many possible types and variations to teach children. For Aldrich and Sheppard, it was CLEAR, their mnemonic form for remembering the criteria for selecting graphical information as a teaching aid. Looking at more examples and inviting children to think about them harder would invariably pay off in developing their graphicacy skills. Check out our other posts about graphicacy education.

Graphicacy: Deciphering The Code

We try to remind ourselves that even though our students are bombarded with visual stimuli, they don’t always grasp how to parse the incoming images. We’ve cautioned before against assuming that students can intuitively “read” pictures and graphics.

If graphicacy refers to the roster of skills necessary to comprehend optical inputs, then we can communicate these skills by teaching the decoding and encoding of visual data. For us, decoding means judging, evaluating, challenging, or knowing the message underlying a cartoon, chart, or corporate brand. Encoding, on the other hand, is often the overlooked sibling in education. Encoding in many ways is the truer test of internalization, because it involves the ability to produce unique representations that reveal the layered skills of graphicacy. For us, encoding means creating, drawing, writing, or designing original and meaningful graphics.

Balchin and Coleman (1965) first introduced the term graphicacy to refer mostly to geography education. They meant to emphasize a spatial understanding that could not be conveyed solely by words or numbers. In his noteworthy paper, “Graphicacy As A Form Of Communication,” P.D. Wilmot (1999) of South Africa’s Rhodes University builds on Balchin’s, Coleman’s, and other scholars’ work to argue that an inclusive curriculum in graphicacy must be added to national standards.

Wilmot posits that graphicacy is equal to other literacies of oracy, literacy, and numeracy. Everyday encounters with pictorial representations, such as infographics, matrices, maps, logos, diagrams, word clouds, and icons, all require a “symbolic language” to translate ideas about “spatial relationships.” (p. 91)

Wilmot explains that specific mental skills are necessary to understand (decode) and to create (encode) graphic items. As he notes, “because perception involves both a physical process of ‘seeing’ and an intellectual one of interpreting, it is bound up with the development of cognitive skills.” (p. 93)

Most interesting in Wilmot’s thesis is that in scrutinizing early papers about information saturation (Fry, Gillespie, Glasgow, Van Harmelen & Boltt), he in many ways presages the modern harbingers of information overload (Palfrey & Gasser, Gleick, Weskamp, ASIDE). If the verdict is in about visual strain, then we genuinely “can no longer afford to neglect graphicacy as a form of communication.” (p. 92)

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

Designing Information: The Need For Graphicacy

There is a burgeoning need to categorize and reshape today's information in innovative, recognizable, image-based ways. Now, with the onslaught of visual stimuli, from the Internet to infographics, there is a need to represent pictorially the multi-dimensional world of 3D and 4G information. From an educational standpoint, this means designing complex information for a range of learners. The manipulation of data through the use of images is crucial to understanding facets of meaning.

ASIDE 2011

Graphicacy represents an emerging literacy joining mathematical, textual, media, technological, and financial proficiencies. It moves beyond just being "visually literate" and instead combines mathematics, statistical analysis, geographic interpretation, and graphic design. Graphicacy is the ability to analyze and interpret information in a graphical form. It delineates clear, achievable skills that encapsulate the necessary benchmarks for today's children and tomorrow's professionals. Essentially, teachers must design information for educational use and also help their students decode the visual galaxy that encompasses their current world.

The crucial skill of graphicacy is vital to sustaining the relevance of a school's curriculum and also to sustaining the prominence of school graduates in a competitive marketplace. Students must be graphically literate to be informed, as they slice data, images, and words into layers of information and construct relational meanings. Graphicacy education, like literacy, oracy, and numeracy, completes the lines of communication necessary for learners in the 21^st century.

Resources:
The Emergence of Graphicacy by Poracsky, Young, Patton
Graphicacy: The Third Skill by Spielman
Graphicacy as a Form of Communication by Wilmot