GEE 2A: Reading Visual Art 1

LEARNING GUIDE

Week No.: __1__

TOPIC: Introduction to Cultural Studies, Visual Culture and Visual Literacy

EXPECTED COMPETENCIES

By the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:

CONTENT

Some people look while some people see. Someone is looking when he can
easily describe an object presented to him: its color, shape, size, smell, and texture.
These are descriptions perceived by our basic senses. What this person is doing is called
literate looking. What he sees is what he gets. It does not analyze the said object or
make sense of its relevance to a context. For example, when you look at a boy, you
immediately notice his eyes, his height, his size, his clothes, his skin color, and the way
he moves. This is also called tacit looking because people do not allow themselves to
make particular sense of certain things beyond their obvious functions.
Someone who sees is one who understands the rules and conditions of a
particular thing in a specific context. He will take an analytical and reflective approach
to how and why he might see something in a particular way (Schirato and Webb, 2004).
This is an act of ‘seeing’. It involves analysis, reflection, and critical reasoning. From
such attitude, the person will be able to draw an incredible amount of information.
Taking the boy again as an example, the second person will notice mannerisms and
certain ticks that will allow him to understand the subject’s characteristics, background,
and even relations.
However, it is important to note that there are factors that could affect the way
people see things. It will differ based on the observer’s background, education, social,
as well political orientation. Age, sex, and religion could also be factors that could affect
the role of a person when it comes to the activity of ‘seeing’. A doctor will notice things
about a rape victim that a lawyer will not be able to see. A teacher can identify
something about a student that parents fail to understand. Why do these people have
different responses to such situations?
These variations would boil down to the differences in our literacies, in this
case, visual literacy. The way we perceive things depends on our specific frames that
include our interests, tastes, training and necessity (Schirato and Webb, 2004). We also
have to take into consideration that these factors develop, change, or recede. Try
reading a story that you have read when you were in elementary. How did you feel
reading it now? How about watch a movie or show that you liked five years ago? Did
you process the scenes the same way you did when you first watched it? For sure,
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something has changed and these changes can be attribute to the environment and
culture that we were exposed to.

Cultural Studies

Understanding one’s culture can help develop the way we react or behave in
different situations. Thus, Cultural Studies has become integral as an interdisciplinary
field that combines theories and practices from the humanities and social sciences
disciplines. It is studying the world we live in and how we function in it (The University
of Winnipeg). It takes as its focus the whole complex of changing beliefs, ideas,
feelings, values, and symbols that define a community’s organization as well as its
members. It also combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn
from various schools of thoughts.
Raymond Williams defines culture in three different ways (as cited in Rothman,
2014). First, it is a process of individual enrichment as when we describe someone as
‘cultured’. Second, it is a group’s particular way of life. Finally, it is an activity as
evident in museums, books and movies. These are three different definitions but they
all imply that culture is an expression of human potential, unpredictable and growing.
This influences the way we communicate as well. How we interpret and express
the things around us are affected by cultural values and norms that we are exposed to.
Figure 1 shows the numerous ways culture manifests in our world. How do we relate
or connect to each aspect?

Figure 1
The Culture Wheel

Visual Culture

Visual culture is a field of study and a set of ways of understanding the social
and physical world (Schirato and Webb, 2004). It might seem new but this has been
around for quite a long time already. However, it was integrated into different
disciplines including philosophy, aesthetics, astronomy, art, history, film studies, media
studies and others. The concept of visual culture is what ties all these disciplines
together to help us make sense of our world, something that many scholars from the
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past had been doing. We are prone to look at what is around us and we have the natural
instinct to perceive everyday experiences and analyze them. It helps us understand the
world through ‘seeing’. Our interpretations may vary but that is because we have been
exposed to different experiences. One may analyze an image from a scientific point of
view. Another might use a feminist perspective while some may go for a philosophical
standpoint.
Regardless of our varying approaches, the way we study would still come from
cultural theory, an interdisciplinary field that has close links with the humanities and
social sciences. It involves the politicizing of theories that lets us understand human
and institutional relations and practices more vividly. It asks questions like:
• Why are things as they are?
• How could they be different?
A literary scholar is able to explain the meaning of short stories, poems, and
novels as well as the context of the author’s work. But going further into this analysis
is the cultural theorist who will put the literary piece into a realistic context and analyze
its value and relations (Schirato and Webb, 2004). So fundamentally, a cultural
theorist’s approach will focus less on enumerating the characters and their roles, the
setting of the story and the plot but rather delve into the context of its writing which
will include the author’s background, social class, gender, and reasons that made such
works prominent and important.
These approaches, some of which will be discussed later on in the course, will
reveal the different practices and concepts that will develop our abilities to read visual
culture. The act of ‘reading’ is involved as visual culture uses semiotics, an analytical
approach and research methodology that examines the use of what are called signs in
society. A sign is a basic unit of communication that has meaning for someone. It may
take on various forms like, for this course, visual forms. A group of signs is called text.
It is a collection of signs organized in a specific way to make meaning. The lyrics of a
song is a combination of elements that the musician put together because it meant
something. For example, here’s a snippet of the lyrics for Taylor Swift’s song “Out of
the Woods”,
Looking at it now
It all seems so simple
We were lying on your couch
I remember
You took a Polaroid of us
Then discovered
(Then discovered)
The rest of the world was black and white
But we were in screaming color
And I remember thinking
Are we out of the woods yet?
Are we out of the woods yet?
Are we out of the woods yet?
Are we out of the woods?
Are we in the clear yet?
Are we in the clear yet?
Are we in the clear yet?
In the clear yet, good…
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What was the context surrounding the writing of this song? What feelings are
reflected in the words (signs)? What was the context of using the idiomatic expression
‘out of the woods’? Why did she repeat this line? Would the song still have the same
effect if she removed the repetition?
By answering these questions and more, we become more critical and
eventually more sensitive about the way we translate such works into our reality. From
the point of view of visual culture, it is not just a song, a movie, a novel, or a picture, it
is a story of human experiences.

Visual Literacy

The way we interpret our culture also connects to what is called visual literacy.
It is defined as a group of vision competencies a human being can develop by seeing
and integrating other sensory experiences (Debes as cited in Braden, nd.). Wileman (as
cited in Stokes, 2001) describes it as the ability to read, interpret and understand
information presented in pictorial and graphic images. It is associated with visual
thinking which is defined as the ability to turn information of all types into pictures,
graphics, or forms that help communicate the information. Sinatra (as cited in Stokes,
2001) says that it is the active reconstruction of past visual experience with incoming
visual messages to obtain meaning with the emphasis on the action by the learner to
create recognition. This brings to light the role of images as a form of specific language
that are used to communicate messages that must be decoded in order to have meaning
(Branton, 1999). What message is being communicated in Figure 2?

Figure 2
Editorial: Lesson from barrier controversy (Sun Star – Cebu)

Visual elements such as images have been integrated into many things today
from textbooks to computer interfaces (Stokes, 2001). It allows us to create imageries
to represent our interpretation of the things we see. Historical accounts of scientific
discovery and invention have shown that visualization is a powerful cognitive tool
(Rieber as cited in McLoughlin and Krakowski, 2001). The term visualization is
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familiar to us from common usage and it fundamentally means ‘to form and manipulate
a mental image’. It has been done for a long time and has become essential in people’s
everyday life to solve problems and converse critically.
Visual literacy enables us to both understand and make visual statements as we
become sensitized to the world around us, the relationships and systems of which we
are a part (Seels as cited in McLoughlin and Krakowski, 2001). It integrates our own
experiences and imagination with social experiences, allowing us to take in visual
elements and justify their relevance into our own lives.
Visual messages are ubiquitous. They surround us to provide information about
what goes on in our communities. We see them on TV, on social media, on the
newspapers, and posters. But how do we interpret them in a way that actually made
sense in our life? To be critical in our responses to these visual elements have become
an important part of our daily conversations, especially when it comes to politics and
economy, and most recently the COVID19 pandemic situation. Suddenly everyone has
something to say with what they see? Why is that? Because everyone is experiencing
it. Take a look at Figure 3. How would you interpret this scenario? How did you come
up with that response?

Figure 3
A powerful front liner hurt by a patient who refuses to reveal his COVID-19 status while being
attended to (posted March 24, 2020) on Filipino Jerameel Lu’s Facebook page

To be visually literate is to be critical and dynamic in the way we articulate our

References
Braden, R. A. (n.d.). 16. Visual Literacy. The Handbook of Research for Educational
Communications and Technology.
http://members.aect.org/edtech/ed1/16/index.html
Branton, B. (1999). Visual literacy literature review.
http://vicu.utoronto.ca/staff/branton/litreview.html
McLoughlin, C. & Krakowski, K. (2001). Technological tools for visual thinking: What
does the research tell us? Paper presented at the Apple University Consortium
Academic and Developers Conference, James Cooks University, Townsville,
Queensland Australia.
Rothman, J. (2014 December 26). The Meaning of “Culture”. The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/meaning-culture
Schirato, T. & Webb, J. (2004). reading the visual. Allen & Unwin.
Stokes, S. (2001). Visual Literacy in Teaching and Learning: A Literature Perspective.
Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education, 1(1), 10-19.
The University of Winnipeg. Overview: Cultural Studies.
https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/cultural-studies/about-the-program/index.html

Image References
Figure 1
https://www.bridgestogether.org/celebrating-our-culture-a-new-how-to-guide/

Figure 2
https://www.sunstar.com.ph/article/1867530/Cebu/Opinion/Editorial-Lesson-from-
barrier-controversy

Figure 3
https://www.ajpor.org/article/18027-public-opinion-on-the-duterte-administration-s-
covid-19-period-through-editorial-cartoons-on-facebook