Supported by Dondis' studies on "visual literacy" (capability to read and write through images), I report on the results of an investigation on the process of learning and teaching in higher education based on the usage of images. In visual messages, one can identify three levels of information: a) represented information, through which the environment one sees is replaced by other visual records, such as drawings, photography, paintings, or scheme which, on a greater or smaller degree of authenticity, pictures the virtual experience scenario and facilitate its recognition; b) abstract information, through which experience/environment data distance themselves from their visual references, causing the representation to take-on universal, general, and wide- ranging values in such a manner as for the drawing or illustration to no longer be the representation of a particular being, rather of a class, a category, of an idea or concept; c) symbolic information, which includes a wide- ranging system of symbols that are arbitrarily coded by human beings to mean and transmit content/orders/feelings to other human beings. These three levels of information - representation, abstraction, and symbolism - are, usually, interconnected in a visual account, with a greater or smaller level of superposition, depending on the proposed objectives and on the intention of those who make the account: describe an object or a scene; characterize a concept, an idea; explain the relationship between the objects; emphasize or depurate the assimilated contents. The image of a pineapple, for example, remits, in the pure photographic representation realm, to a fruit; in the abstraction and symbolic dimensions, however, the fruit - that has an acid flavor - remits, with the association of ideas, to the notion of a "problem," and, per extension, to the time and effort required to "peel" the problem, i.e., to solve it. The work has as its starting point the activities carried out with the students of a Master's Degree Program in Dentistry, in the Higher Education Didactics class, required to all those who take this course. This is a study of the intuitive form through which students from another area (Health) that is unfamiliar to me (Didactics and Teaching Practice), provide enriching subsidies for the teaching practice. The students carried out a meta-exercise with didactic resources (magazines, scissors, glue, magic markers, and kraft paper) to make Didactics itself explicit and to manifest their expectations regarding the Higher Education Didactics class. A student wouldn't normally use the word "pineapple" to describe the concept of "didactics," or even part of it. Using the visual literacy practice, however, the students who participate in the exercise allow themselves rhetorical permissions and concepts are dealt with in a more emphatic or unique manner. The proposed exercise is based on the belief that by converting the student into an active image reader/producer, his/her interaction with the theme in the specific classroom situation will reveal not only the concepts that are read or learned in an intentional manner, but also bring up data, attitudes, perceptions, and feelings of dimensions other than the cognitive, but which are equally important when preparing future educators. This work aims at reporting on this experience and at reiterating the role of Didactics in leading the teaching and learning process in order to avoid failures and maximize the probability of success.