Improving Children’s Visual Literacy by Fostering Visual Design Thinking through Arts-Based Methods

The field of visual literacy (VL) has rapidly grown, partially because of its potential to stimulate the conceptual process of visual thinking (VT). Humans have always enjoyed visual stimuli, but the new generation of children have access to a more powerful visual experience than previous generations. This paper presents the results from a summer workshop for children aged between 10 and 12 that was conducted at the University of Lapland, Finland, in 2021 Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS); the project was a European-wide testbed and part of a Horizon 2020-funded research project.
In this paper, the significance of VL is investigated by integrating arts-based methods (ABMs). The objective is to explore learning as a function of design thinking (DT) that can tap into the voices and expressions of children to enhance their creative mindsets. The findings can help in raising children’s awareness of their surroundings, making them stakeholders in formal and nonformal learning. A four-topic analysis is presented, here aiming to engage children in visual design thinking (VDT) processes; this can lead to enabling the children to express their emotions and cognitive experiences while giving them the ability to enhance their reflections in a way that can impact their creative mindsets.