In an effort to advance visual literacy (VL) education, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a VL instruction program for 2.5-4-year-old children in a public library setting. The study was designed as a series of VL workshops for young public library visitors. Each workshop collected information about children’s existing VL knowledge, introduced them to new visual concepts, and measured their engagement and comprehension of the newly acquired material. The study data were collected via questionnaires and observations.
The proliferation of images and their increased use in academic and everyday information practices has sparked an interest in visual literacy as an area of research and library instruction. Teaching approaches and student learning are examined using theoretical frameworks and a variety of methodological strategies. This paper provides a review of research methodology adopted in empirical studies of visual literacy that were published in academic journals between 2011 and 2017.
Archival instruction pedagogy is shifting from traditional lecture-based show-and-tell approaches to more active hands-on strategies that fall within the realm of active or inquiry-based instruction. Archivists are beginning to assess their instruction sessions using reaction assessments, learning assessments, performance assessments, and blended approaches; gathering data to illustrate the efficacy of the instruction pedagogy employed and thereby shedding light on how archives contribute in meaningful ways to student learning.
New image citation standards need to be developed for college and graduate students to meet visual literacy standards. The MLA Handbook, 8th edition, and Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, do not adequately clarify how to caption, attribute, and cite images. Other image captioning and citing resources are available, but they refer to the MLA and Chicago manuals. Image captions from scholarly journals vary widely and cannot be used as examples for students to follow. Recommendations are also provided for future editions of the MLA Handbook and Chicago Manual of Style.
Design students can pose multiple challenges for librarians. Their information-seeking behaviours are often less linear than those of their university colleagues. Developing library initiations and instruction becomes even more challenging when working with international students who bring different cultural backgrounds and language competencies to their college programme. They also have varying degrees of experience with and knowledge about libraries.
Academic librarians have a demonstrated interest in digital tools for teaching and learning and often provide support for these tools to their wider campus communities. Additionally, many librarians incorporate these tools into their own teaching in the information literacy classroom. However, little has been written about how digital tools can support critical information literacy and critical pedagogy specifically in library instruction.
In a four-session Summer Bridge programme, we experimented with new curricular and pedagogical ideas with a group of incoming freshmen. We developed the Comics-Questions Curriculum (CQC), which melds students’ question asking with a focus on comics. The purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale for and ongoing development of the CQC as well as the ways the CQC fosters engagement of students and librarians, builds upon students’ existing skills but propels them forward toward college-level work, and positions librarians as partners in students’ college work. Although it was designed for a specific purpose initially, the CQC in its current state is widely adaptable to other contexts beyond the original scope.
In this article, we use an interdisciplinary, short-term study abroad program in Berlin, Germany, “Memorializing the Holocaust,” as a case study to demonstrate the importance of incorporating visual literacy competencies into study abroad course curriculum. By focusing on visual literacy, the program helps students navigate beyond their initial touristic relationship to the iconic images and sites in Berlin, allowing them to re-envision and reflect upon their significance.
In academic libraries, information literacy traditionally focuses on instruction sessions and classes, activities in library learning spaces, and interactions with librarians. Often overlooked but equally as important to augmenting the student experience is employment in academic libraries and its relationship to the development of information and other literacies. This is particularly true concerning the contribution of special collections and archives, as most scholarship associated with primary source literacy focuses on instruction. This article begins to fill this gap by reporting the results of a series of qualitative interviews with student employees who worked directly with special collections and archives.
While much has been written about implementing the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in various classroom settings, this article addresses mapping the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education to the Framework in designing instruction for art and architecture students. Disciplinary lenses, allowing for an integrative, pragmatic heuristic, are coupled with an integration of approaches found in the library instruction literature, including faculty and librarian teaching partnerships and assessment. The versatility of mapping these professional documents is demonstrated through implementation in both one-shot and embedded instruction.
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.
Visual information is a central component of today’s information ecosystem, whether it is used to supplement other formats or as a stand-alone method for communicating. Visual information itself can come in many formats, including graphics, tables and figures, multimedia, and photographs.
The quality of a data display can have an impact on the interpretation of those data. A survey of the literature indicates that data displays can vary in quality of accuracy, clarity, and efficacy. In this study we develop and apply an evaluative rubric to graphs in a sample of six education journals: three research and three practitioner. Results indicate that graph quality is typically high in educational journals, however, in practitioner oriented journals issues around graph clarity and efficacy should be addressed. Common error patterns are pinpointed, and four recommendations are made to authors and editors: focus on meaningful labels, increase amount of data displayed, portray multiple relationships, and elaborate with supporting text.
For this article, an architect and librarian teamed up to systemize the means of theoretical development in architectural design students through the use of visual culture (film). To achieve their goal, they used pedagogical criteria to measure and assess the accrual of visual skills. Architectural design education is inextricable from city-based exploration and research. Traces of how architecture is taught and evaluated are embedded in the built environment. Teaching strategies that guide the development of visual literacy skills are essential in order to optimize the learning experience. To effectively apply these strategies, professors and academic librarians need to work in close collaboration to strengthen their students’ visual skills.
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.
In the early drafts of the Information Literacy Framework for Higher Education, metaliteracy and metacognition contributed several guiding principles in recognition of the fact that information literacy concepts need to reflect students’ roles as creators and participants in research and scholarship. The authors contend that diminution of metaliteracy and metacognition occurred during later revisions of the Framework and thus diminished the document’s usefulness as a teaching tool. This article highlights the value of metaliteracy and metacognition in order to support the argument that these concepts are critical to information literacy today, and that the language of these concepts should be revisited in the language of the Framework. Certainly metacognition and metaliteracy should be included in pedagogical strategies submitted to the newly launched ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Sandbox.
The tenet of this article is that historic scientific works, along with science-themed artists’ books, photobooks, and U.S. government-produced reports, can contribute to contemporary science education in inspiring ways. By integrating these materials into undergraduate science-writing projects, we are pioneering an alternative paradigm that merges the sciences and the arts. We are teaching undergraduate science majors through content that invokes scientific curiosity, sparks creativity, and makes science accessible.
The visual dominates our visual culture and has become an essential tool for universal communication. The information landscape is embedded in contemporary culture through the internet and social media; wi-fi and remote access to library resources enable immediate access to information. The visual has become an essential resource and source to share. Image cross boundaries and non-verbally illustrate information – a global language that unifies all cultures. Therefore, when communicating human rights issues, images narrate the past and present. How do our brains process these visual resources, and what influence does this neurological process have on interpreting visual images of culture or human rights?
This chapter examines how new visual literacies allow students to create meaning and develop competencies needed for the 21st century. Today’s generation is continually exposed to visual and digital media. Through empirical work, this chapter highlights how emerging visual technologies such as big data, infographics, digital badges, electronic portfolios (ePortfolios), visual social media, and augmented reality are facilitating the development of technology-related skills required for students in academics and in the workforce. Each visual technology platform will be examined for their usefulness in promoting engagement, subject-matter knowledge, and collaborative learning outside the traditional classroom approach.
This paper aims to present recently published resources on information literacy and library instruction providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.