Are images invisible?

I am a very photographic learner, so seeing images helps me understand more about the written word and helps me make deeper connections to the material. At the same time, it makes sense that sometimes visuals can be invisible to the learner. The Burke article suggested that, “historians do not take the evidence of images seriously”. I thought this was strange, but when I thought about it you rarely see visuals alone to describe history. Images are usually accompanied by words that tell the story, and the images are just used as representations or depictions to support what is written. We rarely let the images tell the story themselves. Images have served important roles in telling the stories of the past since before the Renaissance. Back then images often told stories by themselves. A person could gain an understanding of a battle by looking at a series of images, but somehow images have become less important as prose has risen in prominence. “As one historian puts it, historians prefer to deal with texts or political and economic facts, not the deeper levels of experience that images probe.” Images can serve as a form of evidence to back up written word, and that is what we see now. There are many types of visuals that can tell stories of the past. Painters could also be considered historians. The history these kinds of artists usually represented was that of national history. They would paint images of war victories. A single image, to a series of images, then a strip narrative can tell the story of what did happen, or in many cases what should have happened. Many images of the past were used a propaganda. The Bayeux Tapestry is an important example of a strip narrative and explains a great deal about the Norman Conquest in England. Even still, the images must be placed in their proper context, and it is necessary to understand who created the images and where. The Werner article encourages teachers to use the images in textbooks as a way to teach their students about the past, not just to “lighten the word” or support the story.
Using images, and allowing students to draw on their own interpretations of the images enables helps achieve the goal of depth of knowledge and higher order thinking, not just the learning of facts. Students must know that they have the authority and capacity to assess the meaning of an image.In the Staley article, Edward Tufte calls images that are meant to convey information, “cognitive art.” Images in books like The Rise of the West are meant to be cognitive art. Staley believes that cognitive art and information images, such as maps, are a serious form of representation in history. Staley suggests that images can accomplish things that written prose can’t. They can depict dimensionality and structures when prose cannot always accurately describe these things.

Looking at ways to use visuals in the classroom, I think as assignment similar to one we just did would be very beneficial and a wonderful and engaging learning experience. I thought that it would be really good to do a visual assignment in a US History class when I would be teaching about the 1960's. There are so many defining images of that era, and visuals can say so much about the changing times that American's faced. I would assign a project in which my students had to find an image representing some part of the 1960's, and they would analyze the image, as well as provide contextual information, and present the image and their research to the class. I think this would be a very interesting assignment, it would be brief, but would convey a lot of information in a little bit of time. I really may keep this idea in mind when teaching about the 1960's.