This course introduces innovative approaches to learning and teaching, with a focus on the use of e-learning and social web technologies.
11.2 Designs of Visual Meanings
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Module 2: Making Meaning by Reading + Making Meaning by Writing + Making Visual Meaning
This module begins with an overview of the conventional focus of literacy pedagogy – reading and writing. In its second half, the module applies a parallel set of tools to analysis of visual meanings.
Taught By
Dr William Cope
Professor
Dr Mary Kalantzis
Professor
As we know, writing has a whole middle language about how it's designed and
how we understand it's components and parts.
Well, image making also is designed and
we need to understand it in the same complex way.
Just like writing and language, we are born into the available designs.
Imagine what your grandparents saw as individuals.
What your parents saw?
What your children are singing?
Much more meaning is communicated now with visuals
given the circulation of videos and
cameras within devices that are easily available to everybody.
So we're born into a very rich visual environment, and we engage with it, and
we make meaning with images in very powerful kinds of ways.
And of course, we end up with the communication trace
of our meaning making through video, through photography,
through other forms and other ways in which an image is circulated.
>> Where do we start with images?
Well, we start with the eye.
And the eye captures light, and
then it heads up into our brain into the visual cortex.
It's a whole elaborate, distinct area of
the human sensory system, if you like.
And It's distinct and it's different from hearing.
It's different from the way which we use language.
It's a distinct kind of system.
>> How do we apply the multiliteracies grammar to images?
What kind of choices do we make?
How does the design come together?
And if you'll recall, there are five questions that we ask of every mode.
The first one of course is, what do we actually see?
How is the image, what choices I've made?
How do we name and describe what's in an image?
For example, it could be a rose, an image of a plastic rose, a red rose,
a thorny rose, a black rose, those decisions
that go into the image is the first thing we have to interrogate.
The second thing we ask is then, how do these choices hang together?
How are they in dialogue?
How do they relate within the image?
And how does the viewer relate to them?
For example, it could be an image of a huge thorny rose in the foreground.
It could be roses raining from heaven.
What does each decision like that mean on the viewer and for the image as a whole?
The third question we usually ask is,
how have the elements of the image been selected?
And how have they been arranged in the space in which they're rendered?
Fourth one is, where is the image situated?
For example, is the rose in a garden?
Is it on the lapel?
Is it in trash?
Are thorns stuck in somebody's eye?
What does the decision mean for us?
So the fifth question is, what is the intention of these choices?
What is the purpose?
What does it mean to do?
How does it make us feel or how does it make us think?
Is the purpose to shock us, to educate us, to please use?
The design that goes into creating an image collectively
has a very powerful effect depending on the choices that are made.
>> How do we then understand the world of seeing?
And how do we understand the world thinking in relation to the world
of seeing?
Well, one of the sort of important canonical thinkers
about this problem is the English of that century philosophy of John Locke.
And he famously had this idea that who we are in the world
is constructed by the observations that we've made.
So, as young people, as babies, we're what he called a tabula rasa, a blank slate.
And it's the things we see in the world, and the things we observe in the world,
and the things that are part of our perceptual experience,
which shape us as people and which then become our knowledge.
One of the problems with this kind of Lockean view,
which, by the way, in philosophical terms, it's called empiricism.
It's called the world of experience shapes us.
And the interesting thing about the Lockean view is it's actually very
full of visual metaphors about seeing things and
about experiencing what you see and what you see in the world.
Seeing things is a very big part of that experience.
This is an important counterpoint for what I'm about to say now.
Because the question is, to what extent
is the world that we see cognitively constructed, constructed by our thinking?
And there's one very interesting little atom point if you like, that is that,
it isn't just seeing the world, it's finding things in the world to see.
Let me give you this little example.
That if they've developed various medical techniques [INAUDIBLE] where some people
who are born blind, that blindness can be reversed and it's been reversed in adults.
But when it's reversed, it's not all the sudden they can see the world and
they can learn what things look like, in fact things are not perceptible.
In other words, the same kinds of cognitive processes
which allow language to be formed uniquely in very young children,
there are cognitive processes similar to those or
of the same order happening with vision, happening with sight.
And if you don't have those cognitive processes going on very early in life,
you won't be able to see even if your sight is rectified.
Because seeing is a cognitive thing.
It's a matter of distinguishing things in the world.
And in the same way that you have to learn language when you're very little,
you have to learn to see when you're very, very little.
Now this kind of contradicts the Lockean view in some ways because what it says is,
the mind plays a significant role in seeing the world.
And that mind is constructed and
built as a cognitive system in those early years of life
in the same way the mind is being built in those early years of life by language.
Here's a very simple, classical example of the mind at work.
Have a look at this image.
And it's used to illustrate the distinction between figure and ground.
So I'm introducing a little bit of visual grammar here at the moment.
So, figure is the object you're looking at, and the ground is its surroundings.
Now in fact, your mind, it's possible for
your mind to construct this in two different ways.
So one way, the figure is actually two faces, they're black.
And the ground is the white that surrounds those two faces, right?
But another way to construct this is this is a vase.
And the vase is white, and the space around it, which is the ground,
is constructed in black.
So, this is a very good example about it's not just a matter
of seeing something in the world, the world doesn't present itself to us.
We see it, and we learn from that.
Our mind is actively involved in constructing the world.
And part of those constructions are visual constructions.
Here we have a little child drawing a picture of a cat.
And if you didn't know this is classically a cat, she doesn't look much like
a cat at all to be quite honest, [LAUGH] it could be a lot of things.
If you didn't know that this is the way in which human beings represent cats because
this is not a close representation of what cats look like when you see a cat.
This child has learned something about visual design and
the representation of cats which is conceptual.
And here's a question.
Here you see a series of circles and a series of lines.
And by the last image they've become a cat.
When do they become a cat?
And in fact, the last image is really nothing like a cat but
we've learned that it represents a cat.
So our mind is doing a fair bit of cognitive work in constructing this image
which represents catness, and which we then associate with actual cats,
which in reality look [LAUGH] quite different.
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