Communication is commonly understood as an output or exchange of information, where thoughts are verbalized or expressed in words spoken aloud or by written means. Yet often, communication does not involve words at all. Visual communication, such as that conveyed with pictures, art or other nonlinguistic representations, is all around us in the world we live in today. So while teaching your students to speak and write well is critically important, it is also important that they have the ability to process, understand, analyze and verbalize the visual information they are exposed to. Visual learning can help students develop this ability and make the visual to verbal communication connection by giving them graphical ways to represent and interpret ideas. So follow with me while I explain how a picture – or in this case a diagram – is worth a thousand words.
- This diagram, created in Inspiration®, may be downloaded for any non-commercial use.
Replace a thousand words with a picture
Often the projects or concepts that take a thousand words to explain correctly can be summed up in one visual diagram or image. The greatest of meaning can be communicated to us in the smallest ways through imagery. Advertising and other media provide countless daily examples of this, where information, ideas, thoughts, beliefs and more are being communicated to us visually. It requires a special kind of literacy to understand the meaning behind this visual language. By recognizing this and exercising students’ ability to communicate in this fashion, we prepare them for the world we live in.
In K-12 education, teachers can incorporate some of the following activities from Inspiration® or Kidspiration® into their lessons to help build students’ visual literacy:
- Collaborate with a group and use symbols and images to create a fictional story board without using verbal or written communication.
- Draw or import your own images to create a comic around a book to convey the plot’s rising and falling action without words.
- Brainstorm the parts of an essay by organizing pictures into a web.
These exercises encourage students to creatively develop visual ways of communicating ideas amongst their peers. For students who struggle to verbalize their ideas, the use of imagery as a first step may help them communicate their ideas better when spoken or written later. What’s more, visual communication does not require a common verbal language, so it is not restricted to native English speakers.
Language is not a barrier in visual communication
Often students cannot verbally articulate their ideas to each other when a language barrier is present, but visual communication can eliminate many of these issues. For English language learners mixed in with a class of native English speakers, pictures and other visual representations can help students communicate ideas clearly. A picture of an apple is an apple to every student regardless of whether we call it an apple, una manzana, einen apfel, une pomme or una mela. Visual communication breaks down the barriers between different languages while it develops literacy for our highly visual world.
This month, incorporate visual communication and learning into your classroom. Ask your students to try communicating with a visual diagram rather than a thousand words.
Mona Westhaver
President & Co-founder, Inspiration Software
