Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and The Framework for Information Literacy: VTS & Framework

A great introduction to incorporating VTS into your pedagogy, with helpful tools and tips.

Founded in 1995, Visual Thinking Strategies is a research-based education nonprofit that provides a teaching methodology, a developmentally appropriate image curriculum, and a learner-centered professional development program. VTS cultivates an evolving, global community of practitioners in schools, museums, and beyond.

VTS has been developed and refined over the past 30+ years based on ongoing research by VTS co-founder, Abigail Housen. Abigail and co-founder Philip Yenawine first developed VTS as an effective teaching strategy based on her theory of aesthetic development.

Mary Moeller, Kay Cutler, Dave Fiedler and Lisa Weier, The Phi Delta Kappan
Vol. 95, No. 3 (November 2013), pp. 56-60

Elizabeth Thomas, Nancy Place and Cinnamon Hillyard. College Teaching. Vol. 56, No. 1 (Winter, 2008), pp. 23-27

Tammy Ravas and Megan Stark. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 34-44.

September 12, 2013 by Philip Yenawine
“Discussion is required to learn language” Discussion of images help break cultural barriers, red to me means one thing, but red to someone else means something entirely different, etc.

A description of a teaching approach incorporating VTS into a health humanities course and measuring the effects on the observation skills of undergraduate health professions students.

By Jessica Hunter-Larsen
March 9, 2021
Journal of VTS

1 of the 6 Frames, Research as Inquiry:
Research is iterative and depends upon asking increasingly complex or new questions whose answers in turn develop additional questions or lines of inquiry in any field.

1 of the 6 Frames, Scholarship as Conversation:
Communities of scholars, researchers, or professionals engage in sustained discourse with new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of varied perspectives and interpretations.

Paula R. Dempsey and Heather Jagman. portal: Libraries and the Academy 16, no. 1 (2016).