Andras Benedek

Some twenty years after the term &ltI>iconic turn has been coined, and with a deluge of digital images, videos and animations surrounding, indeed invading, the learning environment, it appears that educational science, and the everyday practice of education, still very much labour under the impact of the past dominance of alphabetic literacy. But while educators clearly need to retain a measure of conservatism, maintain an acute sense for the logic of the written text and preserve the ability to handle extended hardcopy documents, they have to rise to the task, also, of exploiting the potentials of online networked communication, the constant presence of images, both static and moving, and the continuous interplay of words and images.

Pictorial meaning involves not just resemblance, but also pictorial skills, pictorial acts, practices, and performance. Especially in the classroom setting, at all levels of education, it is essential to realize that teaching with pictures and learning through pictures is a practical enterprise where thinking is embedded in doing. Promoting visual learning means to be a visionary, and to take on an enormous educational challenge. But while adaptation and innovation are inevitable in a world where technological changes are rapidly and radically altering the learning environment, educational science and the everyday practice of education clearly need to retain a measure of conservatism. And any conservatism worth the name has to take account of visuality, visual thinking, and visual learning.