Franz Billmayer

Part of the InSEA conference 2018 in Helsinki. http://taide.aalto.fi/fi/research/insea/

The idea of competences is pragmatic. Visual competences show up and are acquired in specific situations. And: competences are developed respective acquired with regard to master potential situations. Situations in which competencies in visual literacy are required can be described by using different categories as genre, visual rhetoric, tools / techniques / media, persons involved, time / occasion, place (s), action / purpose, further aspects. A set of those categories are a good tool for constructing authentic and more of less individualized assignments for classroom teaching. It can even be used for analyzing visual expressions. The idea of situations and their aspects fits well with the critical differences in the variationtheory (Marton & alt.) which is to be shown. The different categories open up for dimensions of variation.
In my presentation, I show how variable aspects of situations – organized in the so called situation wheel – are to be used to construct situation-based tasks and to analyse and to understand images and other visual phenomena.