Arts and Crafts Teacher Candidates’ Visual Literacy Skills

Authors : Mahir Yerlikaya

Pages : 83-90

View : 14 | Download : 9

Publication Date : 2017-12-01

Article Type : Research

Abstract :In the world today, which is intertwined with visuals, the importance of communication skills with visuals are increasing day by day. Visual literacy is necessity for deeper communication with visuals. This necessity is more essential for the areas, which are intertwined with visuals. That's why this research was aimed to describe how was the visual literacy skills of the students studying in Department of Fine Arts Education who were candidate for being teacher.  The sample size of this qualitative research was 140 (91 man, 49 woman) students who were studying at first and final classes of State Universities of Turkey, Faculty of Education Fine Arts Education Department. Data Gathering tool, which was developed by the researcher, consist of nine open-ended questions and class levels, genders and region of the universities of the teacher candidates were asked for demographic characteristics. Content analysis was used to analyze the gathered data. After the analysis, the data was coded in two groups. First group called "Visual Reading Classification”; "Accessing the Visual”, "Visual Codes”, "Analyzing the Visual”, "Interpreting the Visual”, "Evaluation of the Visual” and second group called "Visual Writing Classification”; "Prefers to Sketch”, "Prefers to Write”. And sub headings about the data were given inside. In the light of these codes data were examined. It is observed that responds of the teacher candidate students mostly did not correspond to the answers of the questions. There were no distinctive differences among classes’ levels of the students in terms of their visual literacy levels. This was concluded due to the absence of visual literacy or related lectures in the departments of visual arts. Thus, the alternative solutions for this issue and increasing visual literacy levels of the students were recommended.
Keywords : visual literacy, visual reading, visual writing, visual learning and qualitative research