Building Critical Thinking through Visual Literacy GISELDA DOS

Building Critical Thinking through Visual Literacy GISELDA DOS SANTOS COSTA Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciências e Tecnologia do Piauí- IFPI This work argues that the planned introduction of visual literacy into the School Curriculum can play a crucial role in enabling students to think critically as one of more important 21 st century skills. Visual literacy has the purpose of improving critical thinking abilities which, in turn, would yield improved academic and personal outcomes. Freire (2007) believed that students would not only become critically informed, but also ethically committed to transform their society. For him, critical literacy was mostly about "reading the world”. But how does the visual literacy can be taught to develop critical thinking skills? This poster we will share a visual activity that is being implemented in our school to improve creative thinking of students exploring a videoclip called “Price Tag". METHODOLOGY DESIGN : A CRITICAL VISUAL ACTIVITY We used the students’ cellphones with which we develop activities using videos as multimodal texts. We chose videos because they are one of the participants’ favorite cellphone affordances. The video “Price Tag” was downloaded from the You Tube site and processed in 3 pg format for mobile technology and transferred by Bluetooth to the students' cellphone. 1. What was the author’s purpose in beginning this clip with these images? Use evidences from the text and your ideas to support your answer. 2 -What kind of proverb or expression refers to that image? And in what situations are they employed in our real life? THEORY: MODAL AFFORDANCES According to Santos Costa ( 2013), affordance is an interactive process between the individual and the environment, and the latter is a set of resources for actions available to the agent who needs to perceive the potentialities and initiate action 3 -In our society, there are certain prejudices and / or behavioral differences in our daily lives. See the pictures and mention some prejudices and differences of life explored in the video clip (and discuss with a classmate about these images). 4 -What kind of message did the author want to convey with these images? And to whom was it addressed? Kress (2010) developed the notion of modal affordances in which modes have particularities and limitations in terms of affordances that offer different potentials for communication and meaning of the text, such as Linguistic Affordance, for example, that involves the oral and written language (vocabulary, punctuation, grammar); visual affordance includes stationary and moving image (color, vector, line, plane); gestural affordances comprises facial expressions and body language (movement and speed, body position); auditory affordance involves music and sound effects (volume, tone, rhythm, silence, pause), and the spatial affordance involves the layout and organization of objects in space (proximity, direction, position in space). VIDEO: MULTIMODAL TEXT The definition of the multimodality from New London Group (1996) is the combination of semiotic modes in a single composition to take effect or meaning. But to be "a semiotic mode" there must be a cultural sense shared within a community and all these modes perform social functions that are organized to make sense. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), argue that in multimodal texts the meaning refers to all modes, and a unified interpretation makes a cohesive argument, giving "many voices" to the reader. The authors of a multimodal text, as the video clip, use many ways to strengthen their arguments and realize that several semiotic modes contain unique possibilities and limitations that make them particularly modes able to communicate specific meanings. CONCLUSION -The goal of critical literacy is to raise students’ critical and social consciousness. -Teachers who practice critical pedagogy provide a student- centered environment in which dialogue is encouraged. -Students are taught to examine multiple meanings in texts from multiple perspectives. -Dialogue is seen as a means of developing students' critical consciousness and as a vehicle in which students can begin to question their world. -Critical thinking differs from student to student as they have different interpretations. BIBLIOGRAPHY