The power of the visual image in learning

"Painting should call out to the viewer ... and the surprised viewer should go to it, as if entering a conversation." Roger de Piles, Cours De Peinture Par Principes, 1676

Visual images are powerful teaching and learning tools, providing windows into the past. Every picture has information, a story, woven into it. Pictures, like words, can be read as texts in their own right, not as mere illustrations. The best quality to bring to reading pictures is curiosity: by asking questions we can winkle out the multiple and often hidden meanings in any image.

We need to teach visual skills to children, and that means treating pictures as sources of information. Although children are surrounded by visual images, particularly on television, they often cannot comment on or remember what they have seen - they have not engaged with the images, have not ‘read' them. For that they need to look deeply, to enter imaginatively into the picture, to question, to hypothesise...