FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Looking to Read: Adapting a Visual Literacy Technique for Reading Engagement

Welcome to a seminar about Visual Thinking Strategies

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) originated in art museums as a facilitated technique for developing observational and interpretive skills through open-ended dialogue about images.

In this presentation, Shaun Nolan examines what happens when that technique migrates from the gallery wall into the school classroom and library. Developed by museum educators to build visual literacy without recourse to “correct” readings of an artwork, VTS relies on three deceptively simple questions – “What is going on here?”, “What do you see that makes you say that?”, and “What more can we find?” – to scaffold looking, describing, and collaborative meaning-making.

The seminar presents a research project, piloted in Denmark (Nolan, 2024 & 2026) and now proposed for extension into Swedish schools, that repurposes this art-education technique as an intervention for reading engagement among school children in socioeconomically disadvantaged and linguistically diverse communities. Rather than treating the image as an endpoint of aesthetic appreciation, the project uses it as a threshold object: a picture connected to a book’s themes becomes the occasion for a VTS dialogue that leaves children with a specific text in mind that they want to read.

Shaun Nolan holds a Docentur and is Associate Professor in English and Sociolinguistics at the Department of Culture, Language and Media, Malmö University.