Methodologies for Visuals

Class discussions have helped me to think more specifically about ways that visual literacy are currently utilized in my classroom, methodologies that I use to help enhance students' visual literacies, and areas for improvement. When discussing the article that dealt with the Muhammmad cartoons in class, I couldn't help but continue to go back to the article for the process that the authors used to scrutinize the cartoons. While the authors seem to indicate that visual sources require different methodological tools than textual sources, I believe that the process is more similar than presented in the article. As the authors describe iconological interpretataion, they describe three important steps:
1. Iconographic description
2. Analysis
3. Contextualized interpretation of the visual: meanings attributed to images depend on the social, cultural, and political context in which they are perceived.

While there is a distinction from visual to textual, a similar process can be employed for students to look at a textual source in a way that they describing or comprehending the textual source on a literal level before analyzing it. Just as the article contextualized the reception of the cartoon for Danish and Muslim, I do believe it is especially important for students to contextualize their interpretation of any visual or textual source. How my eleven year-old students look at an image will no doubt be different from how I look at images as a 28 year-old.

In thinking about the cartoons discussed, I am reminded of the questions that are often considered when students are creitically analyzing textual sources. Although they were not specifically stated in Muller & Ozcan's article, I do believe they were part of the process:
-Who has the power? What makes you think that?
-Whose voice is being heard?
-Whose voice is missing?