What Is Visual Literacy

“Work to view my autism as a different ability rather than a disability. Look past what you may see as limitations and see the gifts autism has given me…Be my advocate, be my friend, and we’ll see just how far we can go” –Ellen Botbohm, author of Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew.

I was diagnosed with Autism when I was 2 years old and it has affected my entire life more than anything else I have experienced. It has impacted the way I socialize and communicate with people, the way I think and understand the world,and it also affected my speech and development when I was younger. Autism also affects the way other people see me and I’m often misunderstood. I don’t remember everything about my life at that time, but I do know that I struggled a lot to get to where I am today. I’m also aware that it will impact my future and force me to work harder than my peers. Even though I have Autism, I will always know that it doesn’t define who I am and that I will improve no matter what.

Autism Spectrum Disorder. ASD. Autism. When people hear any of these, it’s either “avoid that person at all costs”, “be super sympathetic”, “pretend to be their friend” or “I have no idea what that is”. My best friend and illustrator of my second book, has no idea what autism is. I tried explaining it to her. It’s very hard to explain how you feel, first of all. To put the fact that you are autistic makes it even more difficult. It doesn’t bother me too much that she doesn’t know. As long as she knows that I truly am a good person, we’re good.

When reading the first chapter of Ten Things Every Child with Autism wishes you Knew by Ellen Notbohm, multiple thoughts ran through my head. I honestly feel that she did an excellent job expressing the thoughts about autism. In my point of view autism is so much more than a diagnosis. Two important people in my life have autism and honestly, they are the most amazing individuals I have ever met. The authors words that brought tears to my eyes was, “My autism is part of who I am, not all of who I am” (Notbohm 17). This statement moved me, because individuals with autism are so much more than a label. Individuals that have autism are talented, intelligent, caring, kind, and funny. We should not judge or treat an individual different by the way they express themselves. Each individual is unique and should be able to express themselves in their personal way instead of being labeled in a negative way. I have personally encounter individuals use words such as, “that autistic boy” or “just leave him other there, he doesn’t understand the material because he is autistic”. When I hear people says these negative things, it makes me angry and sad, because I believe that they have not fully comprehended the diagnosis as well as not allow themselves to get to know

To begin with, before studying this English module, my skills in presenting information in chart format was insufficient. In this visual literacy assignment, students were evaluated on their ability to interpret illustrations as well as various kinds of data and the presentation thereof in a meaning full way. Compared with the first assignment, I scored the highest mark for this one. However, the course material gave me the much-needed background information on creating a meaningful analysis of vast sets of data. For example, the type of data presented in a pie chart will be different from the data presented in a bar or line chart. This was incredibly beneficial information and provided me a new perspective on the creating of charts. Consequently,

Let's jump into the first topic,kids shy away from people who are different then them. This often causes them not to want to talk to children with autism because they appear different than them. This could cause children with autism spectrum disorder to go into isolation. This action could make the way they are different worse. The way they are treated is why there different. Why do people judge people based on the way they look like,how walk,the way they talk.That's called judging which is horrible to have to juggle along with a disorder. why would someone want to be judged by their differences.

Thank you for sharing some great resources. The first two articles you chose I felt were outstanding to begin understanding visual literacy. I loved the information contained in within them as they presented us an overview of what visual literacy is and its importance. It appeared that "the need for visual literacy instruction in the K-12 education" was a very popular resource for the three of us. Did you find elements of it useful that you intend to incorporate into your learning or use with students? I believe Topiel did an excellent job giving readers general information and application for visual literacy, which I found very helpful.

Whenever I hear stories about Autism being addressed in today’s society, I’ve always hear these phrases, “Autistic people have no empathy for others, and therefore they can’t develop long-lasting friendships”. However, I never believed in this statement, because it was a common misconception about Autism. This is coming from someone who has lived with autism though out his life. This means that I only see the world in black and white with no gray area like my peers. So it makes communication with other people a challenge for me due to my social differences with the misconceptions trying to limit my potential of success. But, I’ve choose not to let the misconceptions define me for who I am and stop me from doing my own thing that I have a passion

After some time of trying to cope with my diagnosis and talking to my counselor and other people who I felt could help, I finally started to accept that I am different than other people and may not fit into the box that society thinks is “normal” and that makes me unique. In 1944, Hans Asperger published a definition of Autism. He studied four boys and noted that they all had the same symptoms, a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, and often had one sided conversations. He also noticed that these kids were more prone to being bullied. Anyone with Aspergers or Autism should not be treated differently in general especially within the learning environment.

I have never told anyone my story until now. During Hurricane Katrina, my family moved to Houston, Texas, as Jared, my little brother, entered his toddler years. As my little brother progressed in age, my mother realized he developed slowly in comparison to my younger cousin, so she began to research answers for my brother’s out-of-the-ordinary behavior before a psychologist tested him. When she received the news that my little three-year-old brother was diagnosed with high-functioning autism, she started to search frantically for help from doctors and educational programs. When I discovered Jared’s diagnosis, I was nine-years-old and confused. As a child myself, I did not know how to react to my brother’s condition and felt entirely helpless;

As there are no specific guidelines for parenting, nothing can prepare a parent to receive a first medical diagnosis of their child’s autism. . The burden that parents experience when receiving the diagnosis depends on the following: level of severity; level of the child’s dependency and intensity of needed care; the support that is available to the parents from their close environment; the parents negative views on caring for a child with ASD; negative view on the diagnostic process; levels of passive avoidant coping strategies (Stuart, & McGrew, 2008).

Literacy art, visual arts, and music are all very different ways of expressing oneself. Literacy art is way to express yourself through words and put in the emotion that one is feeling when writing literature. When one is writing literature you are able to express not only your emotion, but also the emotions that the other characters are feeling in the story. When you are able to read about every characters emotion, you are able to understand the situation from another person's point of view and how they reacted.

In 1994 my oldest sister, Christina, was born. She was always peculiar and could never understand or read social cues. When she began puberty, these traits intensified. As an adult, we discovered that she had high functioning, level 1, autism. When I first received a job offer to work with Jake, a 10 year-old autistic student, I believed he would be extremely similar to my sister with the same personality traits and struggles. However, to know one autistic individual is just that, knowing one singular autistic individual. My work and observations of Jake have moved me to consider autism in a new light. With so many adversary stereotypes surrounding autism, I was faced with a sweet little boy who merely needed a little extra help, if only the

Literacy is defined as being literate, that is, being able to read and write in a language. My personal experience with literacy began at an early age, at the age of 4 when I began to sit and read words and letters in the back of my mother’s car. Soon enough, she would bring me a magazine called “Majed” which, in the 90’s, was a popular magazine. With this, I began even more interested in reading and writing and reviewed every word in the magazine associated with each of the short pictured stories. It was the first memory I deeply recall of literacy and it was what laid the foundation for my personal love of reading and writing. The methodology used for this is an interview. There are three interviews which are analyzed and brought together in the form of a narrative. This narrative serves to better explain the emotions and thoughts that the interviewees had about the idea of literacy.

Visual literacy derived from the idea of how people perceive objects (Elkins, 2009, p. 2). Visual literacy refers to the ability to comprehend, interpret and understand the visual information such as still, moving images or graphic representation, and evaluate how the imagery information work together and make meaning in different context (Elkins, 2009, p. 2). To be visually literate means to able to understand how visual elements such as colours, shapes, lines, pattern or symbols construct meaning. According to Mitchell (2008), visual literacy is an essential aspect of language in order to read the text. The above picture shows how visual elements are allowing the student to interpret visual information and construct meaning through drawing.