Visual Culture isn't Just Visual: Multiliteracy, Multimodality and Meaning

The central claim of this article is that contemporary cultural forms such as television and the Internet involve more than the perceptual system of sight and more than visual images as a communicative mode. Meaning is made through an interaction of music, the spoken voice, sound effects, language, and pictures. This means that even the recent shift to visual culture among art educators is insufficient to position art education within a reconceptualized, broad definition of communications. To be relevant to contemporary social practice, art education must embrace interaction between communicative modes. The recent concepts of multiliteracy and multimodality are suggested for this purpose. This article examines why these concepts have emerged, the challenge they make to art education's traditional interest in the visual, and what teachers can begin to do in the classroom.