Truth and lie in visual literacy 2021

Today’s students were born into an image-saturated social media environment, and their literacy practices are mediated visually, including by photo and video creation, and sharing, video chatting, and the visual language of emoticons, GIFs and emojis. Research has found that teaching visually helps develop students’ creativity and thus opens new learning possibilities. Images also enhance memory, which benefits the learning process. Image-based learning helps in expressing thoughts and opinions, which are often provoked or inspired by visual clues. And yet, with all this progress, we have little knowledge of the role of visual literacy educators in teaching students to recognise visual lies and truth in the classroom. More specifically, what theories, technical tools and instructions tell us about image manipulation?This special edition will explore the emerging visual literacy of truth and lies across three major questions: Can a theoretical survey examining students' comprehension of text and visual narrative reveal false beliefs? How can we support our students to investigate visual cultural and historical objects? And how Photoshop tools help build awareness of image manipulation in the classroom.