Visual literacy of training Art professors in the Faculty of Fine Arts (UCM) through visual representations of their own concept of Art

Abstract

An approach to the visual literacy of those who, being trained in Fine Arts, want to dedicate themselves to teaching, and the importance it has for these professionals is presented in this text with the intention of achieving the following objectives: 1) To measure the presence of visual literacy in Arts University Programs; 2) To assess the visual literacy of students through their ability to represent an abstract concept through images; 3) To inquire about the concept of Art that students have and which one they choose to transmit. To do this, everything started from the premise that these students should be experts in visual literacy, due to their handling of visual language as creators and to the type of thinking (visual - spatial) that is assumed to predominate in them. The concept of visual thinking and those of visual metaphor and pictogram were reviewed. In this field of study and within the development of activities on the subject, 25 visual metaphors and 167 pictograms made by students of different University Programs, in which Art is represented as a concept, were collected. These exercises are analyzed both from the formal point of view and from adaptation to the language used, as well as from its content to measure visual literacy and to know the concept of Art that can be transmitted with them. The results show that visual literacy does not appear in the documents that describe the University Programs, although related concepts (visual language, visual communication…) do appear, but there are subjects in the Fine Arts and Design Programs that include related content. Regarding the realization of metaphors and pictograms, most of the students have done it satisfactorily transmitting a concept of Art closely related to the handmade (but also to the mental) and with the brush and/or the palette as key images for their representation.