Teaching Visual Literacies: The Case of the Great American Dust Bowl

Teachers and students require a range of tools to engage with visual texts. Using "The Great American Dust Bowl" by Don Brown (2013) as an exemplar text, we outline four conceptions of visual literacy: rhetorical, instructional, industrial and visuo-spatial and discuss their use in our literacy education practice. In addition, we provide a brief model of a second text, "The Arrival" (Tan, 2013) and a list of suggested texts for students at different levels (elementary, middle, and high school). We argue that these tools have the potential to deepen conceptions of visual literacies and empower teachers and students to understand the many ways in which visual texts operate to send message and evoke response and engagement.