Resource+3

**Resources for Lesson 6 - Visual Literacy**
 * Image 1**




 * Image 2**




 * Image 3**




 * Image 4**




 * Image 5**



//These World Wildlife Fund images were sourced from:// //Design Inspiration. (2009). The Design Inspiration: 50 Creative WWF Campaigns That Make You Think Twice. Retrieved 29th September 2011 from// //http://thedesigninspiration.com/articles/50-creative-wwf-campaigns-that-make-you-think-twice/.//


 * Image 6**



//This image was sourced from:// //Friends of Graythwaite. (2008). Graythwaite: Save our Heritage Parklands. Retireved 29th September 2011 from// //http://www.graythwaite.org.au/action.html.//

**__Evaluation:__**
The first five images (as shown above) are campaign posters used by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) dealing with issues of conservation. Even though some of them aren’t directly linked to specific conservation issue dealt with in this unit, they still portray the idea of managing, caring for and protecting significant natural and built features (and animals) within our world (HSIE ENS2.5). Despite this link, they were chosen for this lesson specifically for their use of powerful and effective visual grammar in gaining attention, portraying a message and promoting a cause within society.

WWF clearly demonstrates the persuasive role of images in political advertising (pairing strong visual images with limited, persuasive text), and Callow (2006) emphasises the importance of using these ‘new literacies’ in the classroom in order to involve students in viewing, creating and critiquing multimodal texts – all of which the students will be doing in this lesson. These “powerfully persuasive images and multimedia need to be met with equally powerful tools for discussion, critique and analysis” (Callow, 2006, p.7) within our image-saturated world today, and hence these campaign posters will help students to experiment with the use of a visual metalanguage to assist with this. The WWF posters will particularly assist students with considering the relationship between written and visual text, considering whether they complement each other, contrast each other, or give new information to the viewer.

A major concept that students will need to grasp in this lesson in order to gain the skills to critically analyse visual texts is that “someone decided which elements to include in the image and considered the inter-relationships among these elements” (Brunner, 1994, p.17). By considering the importance and effective of these elements in the WWF posters, students will then be required to use this knowledge in order to critically analyse the current campaign poster used for the Graythwaite Parklands issue (Image 6). This gives students a chance to explore the metalanguage that they have learnt, and use it in a meaningful context (English RS2.7). This resource was chosen as a contrast to the WWF campaign posters, giving students the opportunity to justify what makes a campaign poster effective in terms of visual grammar, and what makes one ineffective.

However, Brunner (1994) argues that teaching students to be critical analysts of visual images is not enough – instead, the best way to teach visual literacy is “to allow students to be composers as well as consumers” (p.17). Thus, the body activity used in Lesson 6 allows students to experiment with constructing media images, allowing for a rich and meaningful learning experience.

**References**

Brunner, C. (1994). Teaching Visual Literacy. //Electronic Learning in your Classroom//, 14 (3). Callow, J. (2006). Images, politics and multiliteracies: Using a visual metalanguage. //Australian Journal of Language and Literacy//, 29 (1), 7-23.