Visual Literacy: Scales, Charts, Diagrams by Beth Oddy, James Wallace, and Carolyn Wallace
Visual literacy: Tables, Graphs by Beth Oddy, James Wallace and Carolyn Wallace
Visual Literacy: Maps, Photographs, Editorial Cartoons by Beth Oddy, James Wallace and Carolyn Wallace
Essentials of Teaching and Integrating Visual and Media Literacy: Visualizing Learning by Danilo M. Baylen and Adriana D’alba
(Re)thinking Orientalism: Using Graphic Narratives to Teach Critical Visual Literacy by Rachel Bailey Jones
Looking and Learning: Visual Literacy Across the Disciplines by Deandra Little and Peter Felten
Librarians, like many other occupations, tend to rely on text and underutilize graphics. Research on visual communication shows that pictures have a number of advantages over words. We can interact more effectively with colleagues and patrons by incorporating ideas from this research.
This paper implements a content analysis approach to examine syllabi of existing visual literacy and media literacy courses for themes that meet best practices as established by the ACRL standards. These themes have then been combined into a syllabus template representative of a course that will meet the commonly accepted needs of contemporary students in higher education. The template includes recommended readings and assignments.
In our media-driven age visuals are increasingly frequent and prominently present in society and their importance and influence across academic disciplines is growing. This makes it essential to enable learners to become visually literate and justifies the need for teaching visual literacy competencies. Yet, there has been little research on visual literacy practices undertaken across academic subjects and institutions in higher education. Moreover, the key challenges and factors of success for achieving visual literacy education haven’t been studied to date. Accordingly, this research aimed to elucidate the issues most relevant to visual literacy and to identify practices undertaken by universities/ faculties and academic libraries. Explorative and descriptive research was conducted using literature analysis and an online questionnaire distributed to an international group of visual literacy practitioners.
The two authors of this chapter both worked in graphic design departments before obtaining their Master of Library & Information Science degrees, and subsequent professional positions in academic libraries. Framed within a context of visual literacy, this chapter describes each author’s experiences with graphic design and how the skills gained from those experiences lend themselves well to academic library outreach, instruction, web design, and archival work.
The abundance and complexity of information now being delivered visually demands that we become visually literate, as well as verbally literate. We need to understand better a process we have taken for granted. In an age increasingly dominated by images – a media culture, it becomes imperative to develop an understanding of how our visual processing system works; how visual cognition is shaped by social, political, and cultural conditioning; and how visual messages are created to elicit specific responses. One of the chief goals of visual literacy education is to encourage critical analysis of visual communication by developing tools that help us understand and manage this complex activity. “Seeing” needs to become an actively conscious, not a passive activity for us. This thesis illustrates the importance of critical visual literacy, provides an historical overview of the visual literacy movement, and suggests a foundational approach to teaching the basics of visual literacy.
This chapter calls attention to the value of graphic design education in K–12 settings by explaining the history and practice of graphic design, identifying the uses and value of graphic design in education, and sharing a case study of how it can be applied in the classroom. The chapter focuses particularly on the value of constructing meaning with pictures and text, both for teacher use in the classroom and in student picture–text integrated projects. It argues that the visual draft process, which uses pictures and words together, can operate just as powerfully as the writing process to facilitate and demonstrate student learning. This graphic design process gives learners control of their content and liberates them to see different relationships between elements and ideas. At the same time, it frames picture and word relationships as malleable and builds flexible, critical thinking in multiple dimensions.
This study examines how a visual art academic experience might help to reduce anxiety about interactions with the elderly, mitigate fears over aging, encourage more interactions with older people and improve visual literacy skills. University students in an introductory digital photography course interpreted conversations with residents of a local nursing home with visual images. An analysis of critique discussions and student images reveals the project’s capacity for building empathy and visual literacy. This academic experience might help to mitigate students’ fears over aging while establishing intergenerational communication.
Today, the concept of “Literacy” represents reading and writing in various forms of texts which embody knowledge and a range of skills. Different literacies are essential for human to live, work and produce in the society. In order to use communication technologies in educational and teaching processes appropriately, individuals are not only required to become scientifically and technologically literate but also multimedia literate. Within this respect, a Project called “The 21st Century Literacies Education for Teacher Candidates” was conducted with the support of TUBITAK at Amasya University.
Multimedia design center, digital media lab, makerspace, scholars’ lab—there are many names for the ways that academic libraries are embracing a wider definition of the “library as space” concept, “where new and emerging information technologies can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user focused, service-rich environment that supports today’s social and educational patterns of learning, teaching, and research” (Freeman 2005, 3). While actively renovating and reinventing spaces for information/knowledge commons areas, the rationale for this movement is to provide an environment where students have access to equipment and space to experiment. The underpinning of this movement encompasses two key missions of academic libraries: to develop skills in information literacy and to encourage critical thinking among college students.
Just as one-shot information literacy sessions can be implemented in college classes to improve students’ research capabilities, similarly-styled sessions on image research can increase their visual literacy skills. The desired outcome of teaching an instructional session is to provide students with the tools and confidence they need to effectively use high-quality visual materials in their undergraduate years and beyond.
Astronomy classes that teach students to read and write images, diagrams, and plots offer an ideal venue to teach visual literacy.
Information professionals such as archivists and librarians are faced with the challenge of preserving, describing, and providing access to information encoded on a variety of media, both text based and visual. While the visual and media literacy discourse recognizes the role of information professionals in visual, media, and information literacy education, the literature contains few pedagogical approaches those charged with training informational professionals at the graduate level. This chapter discusses one approach to visual and media literacy instruction in the Moving Image Archives course offered at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, and suggests one method for visual and media literacy instruction at the graduate level. This technology-based approach addresses the “designing and creating” competencies from the Association of College and Research Libraries Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, creating an environment that simulates production by introducing students to the tools and technologies of media production. This approach could also be used in other academic disciplines, such as film and media studies, where students learn to analyze and interpret specific media products, but do not engage directly with the technologies used to create these images.
It is a truism that archaeology is a profoundly visual discipline; it is paradoxical, then, that so much of its output exhibits a poor level of what here I opt to call visual competence. There are, of course, many glorious exceptions to the picture I will sketch out here (pun probably intended). Yet as someone who returned to the UK university sector to teach archaeology after a decade as a jobbing illustrator and then museum educator and writer working closely with designers, I am as often dismayed as thrilled by the quality of images in many new archaeological publications, and other documents and presentations created by archaeologists for specialist or public consumption. This is an international issue.
For the benefit of students, employers, and society, data literacy must be recognized as a necessary civic skill (Swan et al., 2009). This recognition should come from all levels of government, and from post-secondary institutions. There needs to be agreement on what
elements of data literacy are necessary in an undergraduate core curriculum, in order to provide a consistent foundational education for those entering an increasingly data-dependent workforce.