Choices are ideologically constructed. Images are fruit of choices. Therefore, images are an ideological way to represent both the world around us and the intentions of those who produce them. What learning situations should we create that could work as effective counter-strategies to keep our students´ own choices as independent and unbiased as possible in the daily ideological bombing they are submitted by media and hypermedia in the contemporary society? The purpose of this paper is to explore the new literacies that could provide students with the necessary skills to understand and generate visual texts. In order to do that we discuss the concept of visual literacy and what semiotic resources are used to the production and strengthening of social relations. The theoretical foundation is based on Kress and van Leeuwen´s social semiotics, whose insights orient the news photo analysis accomplished in the last section of this work.
Critical literacy; visual text; communication
