• A “Visual Rabbi”: Agam referred to himself, perhaps shyly, as a “visual rabbi,” viewing his life work as beingthat of a teacher focused on visual literacy. He is determined to share the creative experience with the public.
• The Agam Method: Agam created the Agam Method of Visual Education (later the Agam Program/AgamSmarts) in collaboration with educators and psychologists.
◦ Goal: To teach visual literacy and foster visual cognition/thinking in young children (ages 3–7). He wasconcerned about the general population’s “visual illiteracy”.
◦ Rationale: To balance the educational system’s lop-sided emphasis on verbal language by introducing avisual education parallel to, and integrated with, verbal education.
• Curriculum Structure: The program is a systematic, structured approach composed of 36 units that dealwith visual concepts (e.g., Circle, Square, Pattern, Symmetry, Colors, and the dimensions).
◦ It systematically develops the child’s visual language, starting with basic building blocks and combining them cumulatively according to “grammar”-like rules, mimicking the learning of a language.
• Recognition: The method teaches a universal language and earned Agam the UNESCO Jan Amos Comnensius Medal in 1996
Visual Literacy
A famous Israeli artist, Yaacov Agam, was upset. He marched into the
center for scientific research in education and declared, “Children are
visually illiterate!” The education researchers worked with him to further
develop and test a program he created to teach visual literacy based on a
theory of shapes and how they combine to make everything from
alphabetic letters to great art. (https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/early-math-introducing-geometry-young-children/)
The Agam Program: Visual Education for young children
“The central goal of the Agam Program is to help young children develop their visual thinking, as a means to improve their overall cognitive and emotional development. The program Inspired, initiated, and written by the artist, Yaacov Agam, and has been refined, developed, implemented, and tested by the staff of the Agam Project. Implementation of the program in Israel has been in cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Education. Recent educational research underscores the importance of this goal.
The Agam Program includes 36 units that progressively and logically integrate specific concepts, which can be viewed as elements in a visual alphabet, with specific skills. This visual alphabet is the basis for more advanced units which deal in concepts like symmetry, the four dimensions, and proportionality.”
https://vizuvizu.com/about-us/
Our digital products are based on the award-winning visual education method created by Y. Agam, a world-renowned pioneer of kinetic art. VizuVizu is a collaboration between Y. Agam and the Kadar family, among its portfolio of educational ventures.
Naomi kadar foundation https://naomi.org
https://www.ourboox.com/books/melodies-teacher-stories-the-little-agam-girl