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 Literacies in a US Undergraduate Writing Course: A Case Study of Transmediation

This interpretive case study examines how undergraduate students enact visual literacies, focusing on transmediation from visual-embedded research papers into multimodal brochures, in an entry-level college writing course at a large research university in the U.S. Data sources included students’ artifacts, interview transcripts, and field notes.

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What Does It Mean to be Visually literate? Examination of Visual Literacy Definitions in a Context of Higher Education

Competency in visual literacy (VL) is crucial for effective visual communication, and thus for living and working in a visually saturated environment. However, VL across disciplines is still marginalized in higher education curricula. This tendency is partly caused by the lack of knowledge and agreement on what it means to be visually literate. This study juxtaposes and evaluates 11 VL definitions, selected as the most relevant for higher education practitioners and coined from 1969 (the first one) to 2013 (the most recent one).

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The Effect of Infographics on Recall of Information about Genetically Modified Foods

Agricultural literacy levels are decreasing during a time of great technological growth in the agriculture industry. Many complex ideas, such as genetically modified foods, are gaining public interest while leading to confusion. The role of agricultural literacy campaigns is to be an educational source for those seeking truthful information about such subjects. Although multiple campaigns exist, society as a whole seems to be struggling with grasping topics like genetic modification. When trying to learn such subjects, a leaner’s cognitive resources can be overwhelmed, thus hindering the learning process. The inclusion of visual aids can prevent this from occurring.

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Study on Visual Learning Based on Network Environment

The paper describes a study of visual learning in a network environment, which includes a new instructional model, the STILE (situation, tools, interaction, lucubration, evaluation) model which is based on Problem Based Learning (PBL). We describe the process of blended learning through a teaching experiment which offers a good reference to teachers. We then describe how this model can be carried out in a network environment efficiently. The experimental results show that visual learning in a network environment can improve the learning effect, which promotes students’ learning from passive to active and leads to a better communication and reflection.

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Reading Her Queenly Coiffure: A Collaborative Approach to the Study of Marie-Antoinette’s Hairstyles

Four colleagues–a faculty member, a digital services librarian, a research librarian, and a curator of Special Collections–take turns describing their role in creating an undergraduate student project around an eighteenth-century almanac that belonged to Marie-Antoinette. In recounting the steps taken, the collaborative process, the student research, and the analysis of the contents of the Trésor des Grâces almanac, we share the lessons learned for completing a digital exhibit over the course of one semester.

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Acquiring Visual Literacy Skills: Interpretation of Journalistic Photographs as a Tool for Contemporary Education

Due to the progressive visualization of everyday communication, it has become increasingly
important to understand images and think and learn in terms of images. Tere should not
be any surprise, therefore, that educators express a need to introduce visual literacy into the
curriculum. However, the concrete tools to address this need are still missing. Te variety
of visual methods and approaches provided by visual studies’ literature does not seem to be
particularly useful when applied to education. Terefore, I suggest that a focus on teaching the
interpretation of journalistic photographs is a crucial component of contemporary education,
because it develops students’ visual literacy skills while addressing current requirements
in Higher Education, which expect students to be able to interpret, use and create images.

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Visualizing Oral Histories: A Lab Model using Multimedia DH to Incorporate ACRL Framework Standards into Liberal Arts Education

Visualizing Oral Histories: Comics and Graphic Novels/Digital Humanities Lab, is a new model for digital humanities scholarship that other librarians can follow to create and teach similar DH labs attached to humanities courses at other institutions. The model includes a preliminary syllabus and preliminary assignment rubrics designed to integrate the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education” (ACRL Framework) into course assignments. Incorporation of a DH lab into a humanities course curriculum reimagines librarian roles and creates a pedagogical strategy that explicitly incorporates information literacy standards into the undergraduate course curriculum.

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Moving Pictures and Words: Multimodal Projects in College Composition

Avarice and good intentions: these roads led Laura Ng and Karen Redding to multimodal composition pedagogy. As instructors, the authors are greedy when it comes to incorporating successful techniques into their course. Like more teachers, they constantly seek – through borrowing, adaptation, and invention – new strategies to help their students learn. This constant search means that they keep an eye on the latest developments in composition and pedagogy, and the phase “multimodal composition” immediately piqued their interest, particularly with its implications of process-oriented writing and creative interpretation.

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Hacking the Research Library: Wikipedia, Trump, and Information Literacy in the Escape Room at Fresno State

How can librarians teach information literacy in such a politicized atmosphere? In spring 2017, the library at Fresno State held a series of workshops that introduced first-year students to information literacy in a “gamification” setting, an escape room, to encourage community learning.

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Visual literacy in Instructional Design Programs

In this technologically advanced environment, users have become highly visual, with television, videos, web sites and images dominating the learning environment. These new forms of searching and learning are changing the perspective of what it means to be literate. Literacy can no longer solely rely on text-based materials, but should also incorporate digital images and sounds. Higher education seems to be lagging behind with incorporating visual literacy into their academic programs. This paper explores visual literacy, the digital native, and the importance of integrating visual literacy into our learning curriculum, especially in instructional design programs.

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Visual Language, Visual Literacy: Education a la Modes

I [the author] am writing about visual literacy and visual texts, and in doing so, I will share with you examples of children’s ‘picturebooks’ where alphabetic print is no longer the primary carrier of meaning and where images and print often are symbiotic.

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Visual Approach and Design: The Appropriate Characteristics of Instructional Photos as a Tool to Support Elementary Setting in Kuwait

This study provided a guide for appropriate characteristics of Instructional Photo to be used by teachers, trainers, coaches, instructors, and anyone else who desires to deliver knowledge and present content with visual meaning to elementary students in the state of Kuwait as a teaching style that supports teachers, facilitates clarification, and gets the learners’ attention and motivates them.

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Library Graphic Design Best Practices and Approval Processes

The purpose of this paper is to explore graphic design best practices and approval processes used by librarians. This paper used an online, qualitative survey to collect data on librarians’ design processes and best practices. The responses were reviewed to determine categories and themes of librarians’ design processes and best practices to gain an understanding of the state of graphic design in libraries.

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Learning Program for Enhancing Visual Literacy for Non-Design Students Using a CMS to Share Outcomes

This study proposes a basic learning program for enhancing visual literacy using an original Web content management system (Web CMS) to share students’ outcomes in class as a blog post. It seeks to reinforce students’ understanding and awareness of the design of visual content. The learning program described in this research focuses on to address how to create meanings of visual content that is important to express information visually, and includes three exercises based on perception, visual variables, and signification. The Web CMS to publish student works and share in class helps enhance students’ reflection. We also developed a rubric as an assessment device for students’ outcomes. The content of the learning program and its implementation are described with the support of observational data.

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Individual Learning Strategies and Choice in Student-Generated Multimedia

There has been an increasing focus on student-generated multimedia assessment as a way of introducing the benefits of both visual literacy and peer-mediated learning into university courses. One such assessment was offered to first-year health science students but, contrary to expectations, led to poorer performance in their end-of-semester examinations. Following an analysis, the assignment was redesigned to offer students a choice of either a group-based animation task or an individual written task.

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How the University of Maryland Architecture Library Avoided Closure and Emerged as a Professional Library

In June 2014, the dean of libraries at the University of Maryland announced the libraries’ plan to close the architecture branch library over the summer due to permanent budget cuts that had been handed down from the state of Maryland. After many e-mail messages, a petition, phone calls, and letters, the dean of libraries gave the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation a reprieve of one semester to come up with some creative alternatives to closing. This article explores the process from announced closing to task force report and final decision.

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Stunted “Visual Competence” in Archaeology: a Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

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.

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Questionable Benefit of Visual and Peer Mediated Learning on Overall Learning Outcomes of a First-Year Physiology Course

This paper reports on attempts to incorporate creative visual literacy, by way of student owned technology, and sharing of student-generated multimedia amongst peers to enhance learning in a first year human physiology course. In 2013, students were set the task of producing an animated video, which outlined the pathogenesis of a chosen disease. Students were then encouraged to view each other’s videos. Students in the same course in 2012 engaged in a purely written, non-shared task. The depth of topic understanding did not change between 2012 and 2013. Moderating for cohort variation, students in 2013 showed poorer overall learning outcomes than students in the 2012 cohort. The authors speculate that the peer mediated aspect of the learning activity failed, and that the video task was disruptive to wider learning, due to it being time consuming and unfamiliar to students.

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Librarians and Graphic Design: Preparation, Roles, and Desired Support

Librarians often become de facto graphic designers for their libraries, taking responsibility for designing signage, handouts, brochures, web pages, and many other promotional, instructional, and wayfinding documents. However, the majority of librarians with graphic design responsibilities are not trained as graphic designers. This exploratory research study surveyed librarians to determine their graphic design training and preparation for their assumed design duties as well as the support and training they desire. Results from this study can be used by library administrators when providing support for librarians with graphic design duties.

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