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SRC tightens visual-literacy standards, adds ethics test for altered images
Summary
The SRC revised a set of proposed visual-literacy standards Oct. 7, 2025 — consolidating frame/content expectations, adding research-when-appropriate language, and requiring students to compare original and altered images and evaluate the ethics of alterations.
The SRC edited the proposed Visual Literacy elective to sharpen analytical expectations and sequence standards on Oct. 7, 2025, during an electronic meeting of the Tennessee State Board of Education SRC.
Committee members streamlined several standards (consolidating 'inside' and 'outside' of frame tasks), and repositioned a research standard so students use research 'when appropriate' to analyze historical, social, cultural and political origins or impacts. On media literacy and ethics, members agreed to revise a standard so that students must 'compare an original and altered visual text; evaluate the ethics of the alterations of the visual text,' clarifying that photo and video manipulation should be treated as an ethical as well as technical question in the classroom.
The committee also refined evaluative standards — directing students to judge visual texts against a stated set of criteria — and removed redundant items such as a separate vocabulary-only standard when the same expectation is covered by discipline-specific language elsewhere. The commission assigned staff to renumber and clean up standards, to prepare exemplar rubrics and to fold agreed wording into the supporting language and glossary.
Committee members said the edits aim to make visual literacy rigorous without presuming every classroom will address every standard; staff will return with ready-to-use glossary entries and sample assessment criteria at the next meeting.
