Reading the Visual

The book titled Reading the Visual written by Frank Serafini was listed in my further readings list attached to my proposal. I now wish this had been something I had managed to read before now. The book is written to enable teachers to understand possible frameworks that can be used to understand visual language better. There is a strong emphasis on the medium of picture books which came as a nice surprise for me.

The book comprises of three main sections, Theoretical foundations, Curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches and a third on Units of Study. The first section covers visual literacy, multimodal ensembles, processes and elements of art, design and visual composition. The second covers picture book theories, explores multimodal ensembles and provides frameworks. The third section rounds everything of by explaining units of study.

As seen in the image above many sections have been highlighted as so much much of the information was found to be useful. My next task is to go back through these highlighted sections and pull out what seems relevant to my own case studies. Deciding what elements should be used or disregarded will allow me to build my own framework to carry out the first of my case studies.

The book advises using cornerstone texts which had been my initial thought before reading this book. However I have decided to use cornerstone artists instead for my first two case studies, these will be on author/illustrators Shaun Tan and Levi Penfold. Each will provide a cornerstone text within themselves but I wish to study a few of each of their works. This process will allow me to seek patterns or processes they use, it may also show reasons how each work is different or similar to each other depending on the story or topics within the work. I will begin with works by Shaun Tan as I find his work so inspirational, I already have several of his books but I will choose a few for my case study. Using these works will let me see how useful my framework is then adaptations may be made at any point if I feel it would enhance the structure being used to analyse the work. This book Reading the Visual has been the most important text I have read so far in this project, written academically offering access to names of others in the field whilst also just being an interesting read in itself. This book is likely to become a cornerstone of my project as it is the first to offer such strong frameworks that I understand and feel that I can use constructively, building a foundation for me to work from, some extracts are shown below.