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Matters of Design and Visual Literacy: One Middle Years Student's Multimodal Artifact

Meanings are created, represented, and communicated in multimodal ways in our contemporary world. The dominance of the visual in modern society requires students to be visually literate to understand, appreciate, interpret, and compose the content and the design of multimodal texts that include images. This article features the case study of Jaelyn, a Grade 6 student who participated in a classroom-based research project that explored developing student visual meaning-making skills and competencies by focusing specifically on a selection of visual elements of art and design in picturebooks and graphic novels. The semiotic analysis of Jaelyn's multimodal print text that was completed at the end of the research, as well as excerpts from her interview about her composition, revealed how her participation in the learning opportunities afforded during the explorative study influenced her sign-making. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical and assessment issues associated with teaching students about visual elements of art and design.