Visual communication through traditional and digital tools, Grades 5-11, ages 11-17 years

The National Core Curriculum (2012) in place at the beginning of our project (2016), concentrated on high art and did not involve visual culture and its social aspects. We live an image based, participatory culture, so our teaching and learning programs should integrate everyday situations when traditional and digital visual communication forms are used. Real life situations organise the learning content that helps acquire a wide variety of pictorial dialects and symbol systems. Our students approach art as a sophisticated and aesthetic way of employing the same visual language they use.

In the followings, we briefly describe the aims and methods of this module, detailed in its Teachers’ Manual available in Hungarian on this website, along with a rich collection of tried and tested learning programs.

Developmental objectives

• Self-assured participation in communication processes

• Multidimensional analysis of images: perception, interpretation and evaluation of signs and symbols, compositions; building links between  words and sounds in multimodal messages

• Communicating visually: choosing the appropriate channel, form and content for transmitting personal, social and scientific messages

• Creating in a wide variety of visual communication genres

• Experimenting with new media: video clip, blog, vlog, image based social media

• Development of social sensitivity, empathy and collaboration

Learning content

Creation: representation of people, objects and spaces through contemporary imaging conventions (including technological symbol systems); basic graphic design and typography through traditional and digital media; infographics and multimodal info-communication in real and virtual space.

Perception: interpretation and evaluation of signs, symbols and complex visual communication messages in real and virtual space.

Competence development 

• Visual perception skills: reading simple and complex, historic and contemporary, utilitarian and expressive images, orientation through signs, using multiple perspectives in judgment

• Visual creation skills: drawing, design, abstraction, symbolisation, spatial skills

• General cognitive skills: inductive thinking, autonomy in problem solving, combination, variation

• Creativity: fluency, flexibility and originality in visual communication

Methods

Working form: differentiated, individual instruction, but mainly small group based, collaborative problem solving. Participatory analysis of situations, collaborative planning, creation and review.

Activities: problem based project work. Problems selected from the everyday life of students and socially sensitive issues of society. Individual visual communication products (e.g., advertisements and complex image sequences (e.g. school identity) are both parts of the teaching and learning program.