Hyper-Visual Class Culture

     In the past decades a lot had been discussed and shared about our approach to education in the 21st century context. Incorporation of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) in the classroom, Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation methods and Flipped Classroom Technique are some of the prominent methodologies and approaches that have been adopted to enhance the student learning outcome. However, we are still far from achieving the concept of ‘Education for All’. Every year the world spends millions of dollars on education. United States of America leads in spending on education. It spends $809.6 billion per year. This translates to $7,743 per student in the U.S.A. (Edudemic, 2013, “How 12 Countries Spend Education Money”, para. 2). Inspite of all the money and ‘new age’ approaches adopted globally, a report (Cree, Kay and Steward, 2012) found that more than 796 million people in the world cannot read and write. With such a scenario in front of us, we should be looking at different avenues through which interest in reading and writing can be generated and will eventually lead to increased retention ability.

     Our fundamental problem in the present scenario is that we are not engaging the students in the classroom. We are using a 20th century teaching approach in a 21st century classroom. Apparently it cannot work in today’s classroom. The present generation of students are rapidly evolving into a hyper visual culture. Children today are growing up on a dose of applications like ‘Snap Chat’, ‘Instagram’, etc. These applications expose their users to over 700 millions of imagery per day across the globe (Business Insider India, 2014, “Snapchat’s Growth Is Still Exploding”, para. 3). These figures will amplify every year. Even in the rural set up (of the third world countries) with increased access to television and films, the children are fed a tremendous amount of information through motion pictures. As it is said that pictures speak a thousand words, children today absorb a lot of information in a short amount of time. Now, when this child enters a class room he/she is handed a text with little or no pictures. That is where the students get disengaged, because reading is too slow for them. The students today are hyper visual learners and we require a visual learning approach for the students of today.

     An argument may be presented that visuals already exist in the classrooms in the form of charts, displays and even videos. True, visuals do exist. However, it exists as a secondary source of knowledge. The texts (the primary source of knowledge) that a student has at his/her access (even at home) are primarily devoid of visuals.

     In India comic strips mostly revolve around the historical aspect. They portray the life of kings, queens, conquerors, kingdoms etc. They also depict the freedom struggle and the freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, etc. All this is depicted in visuals, which is engaging for the young mind. There is a tremendous potential in teaching through comics. Carney and Levin (as cited in Levin and Mayer, 1993) stated that pictures improve students’ learning from text because they make the text more concentrated (focused, with respect to directing a reader’s attention), compact/concise (“a picture is worth a thousand words”), concrete (the representation function), coherent (the organization function), comprehensible (the interpretation function), correspondent (relating unfamiliar text to a reader’s prior knowledge) and codable (the mnemonic transformation function).

     It is this potential of visuals that interests me, because there is an enormous possibility that culturalisation of the texts from the school curriculum (e.g. English Literature, History, Science, etc.) in the hyper visual context will enhance the learning of the student and sharpen his/her reading and writing skill. Amongst the exemplifications cited about hyper-visual culture (Mehta, 2013) were school teachers using comic books to teach second industrial revolution in the history class and dichotomy of two personalities in the literature class.

     Recent awareness of this hyper visual culture has urged educators to dwell into its potential to contribute towards learning. We need to consider its plausible dexterity in augmenting student learning ability and also identify means of contextualizing the culture into the classroom environment and curriculum. For a world seeking to meet the educational need of growing population in an evolving environment, there is much yet to be learnt!