Visual Literacy Practices in Higher Education: What, Why, and How?

The nature of today’s communication is overwhelmingly visual. Images, as modes of communication, play a dominant role in our daily activities and are especially prominent in the lives of young people. Today’s students were born in image-saturated environments, the era of internet, digital technologies and touchscreens. Their communication practices are mediated visually, including photo and video creation and sharing, video chatting, and the visual language of emoticons, GIFs, and emojis. However, the moment students enter university classrooms, they are thrown into almost a completely textual world. Such highly textual context may cause an alienation from the course material and content. In consequence, contemporary millennial and post-millennial generations, although usually technologically savvy, are often visually illiterate.

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Visual Literacy in Preservice Teachers: A Case Study in Biology

In this study, we explore the competence of preservice teachers (n = 161) in labelling and creating new cross-sectional human diagrams, based on anatomy knowledge depicted in longitudinal sections. Using educational standards to assess visual literacy and ad hoc open questions, results indicate limited skills for both tasks. However, their competence is particularly poor creating diagrams, where shortcomings were observed not only in visual literacy but in content knowledge. We discuss the misconceptions detected during these assessments.

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Visual Literacy in Practice: Use of Images in Students, Academic Work

Digital technology has changed the way in which students utilize visual materials in academic work and has increased the importance of visual literacy skills. This paper reports the findings of a research project examining undergraduate and graduate students’ visual literacy skills and use of images in the context of academic work. The study explored types of visual resources used, the role that images play in academic papers and presentations, and the ways students select, evaluate, and process images. The findings of the study indicate that students lack skills in selecting, evaluating, and using images. Students use a range of visual resources in their presentations but rarely use images in papers.

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