Interest in the role of visual literacy within education has grown significantly over the last 50 years. Many scholars maintain that living in an image-rich culture in the twenty-first century requires preparing visually literate graduates who are capable of a critical reading and understanding of visual texts, as well as constructing images through critical thinking. However, nowadays, discussion about visual learning and development of visual literacy competencies of students studying business and management remains quite limited. This paper presents a case study of a visual learning activity introduced to 1st year undergraduate students which are often referred to as ‘digital natives’. This activity aims to develop students’ visual critical thinking about a complex social phenomenon of corruption through their engagement with a non-digital activity such as freehand drawing.
This innovative teaching idea, the Digital Image Guide (DIG) Method, addresses the pressing need to develop visual pedagogies in the university classroom by providing a technique for students to use to critically read digital images. This article also introduces the concept of shallow and deep images. It then explains the difference between the two types of images and how to use the DIG Method to dig deeper in order to understand deep images. By utilizing the DIG Method, students can learn to analyze, interpret, evaluate and comprehend images found on social media sites and around the web, increasing their visual literacy skills in the process.
Social networks and collaboration make it possible to offer new metacognitive horizons for comprehension of theories in a group of students considered digitally native. This study discusses the applicability of different forms of visualisation used as a constructivist learning technique on social networks.
Contemporary society is dominated by visual communication, yet visual literacy is a learned skill that requires training. Gender issues, particularly the subjects of gender diversity and power struggles, are deeply pertinent to today’s visual culture. The critical consumption of information has long been taught in libraries, though instruction has typically prioritized text-based sources. However, visual literacy instruction has the capacity to provoke critical inquiry into issues of gender, race, social class, and ethnicity. As institutions that promote social justice, libraries can help improve diversity and inclusion in their communities through teaching visual literacy skills at all levels. Critical visual literacy instruction can also help academic libraries advance student scholarship, which can only be achieved if they are literate in all forms of knowledge production.
This article provides a practical guide for teaching visual analysis to university students. By adapting Serafini’s curricular and pedagogical framework for teaching multimodal representations to incorporate self-reflection, I evince how visual analysis can be taught in a writing course and similar introductory courses.
This qualitative study investigated the perspectives of high school photography teachers regarding visual literacy. A qualitative methodology that used a phenomenographic research design was employed to gain understanding about the perspectives of high school photography teachers in their conceptualization, perceptions, and experiences surrounding visual literacy.
The multi-disciplinarity of visual literacy has become even more pronounced in an age of digital information. What shared questions do we ask in our research, where does our work intersect and how do those intersections define the field of visual literacy? Through an analysis of the articles published in the Journal of Visual Literacy from its inception in 1981 through 2017, this article aims to identify the research topics and questions that tie together the diverse disciplines in which visual literacy research takes place and to suggest areas for future research. Mapping the questions that drive our research can help us better define the field, better articulate the value of our scholarship and better share our work with those in the communities in which we teach and practice.
The aims of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of video games when learning multiliteracies competences, study how to use video games on educational contexts, carry through a program with primary school students, and draw recommendations to design similar projects.
Today’s consumers also termed as the “Eye Generation” consume lots of visual data through the net, mobile phones, advertisement, mobile applications and many others. This is because the visuals are considered as a more accessible means of obtaining and communicating messages.
This research paper describes the application of a didactic innovation project in Higher Education. We present the theoretical foundation of the project. Thanks to the evolution of the Web and the potential of image to disseminate and generate knowledge, visual materials have had an increasingly powerful projection in Education, especially for the development of new methods, media and didactic materials in Higher Education. As a result of researchers interested in it, Visual Literacy has emerged as an academic field developing research and didactic effectiveness of the image, and digital competences and academic literacy as instruments to be integrated into curriculum of higher education for its excellence. We analyse the didactic innovation project by presenting how we integrated a Visual and Academic Literacy competence-based program into a course at the Carlos III University of Madrid.
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).
In recent times, the declaration of the prominence of the visual over other channels of communication has been persistent across several disciplines, including film studies, design, sociology, and literacy education (e.g. Bolter, 1991; Fransecky & Debes, 1972; Kress, 2005; Sartori, 1998; Messaris, 2012). It is within this loom of visuality that the concept visual literacy has been woven together throughout the twentieth century and beyond. This dissertation explores the mobilization of this concept through the last century and addresses the implications of its interdisciplinary and polysemic nature. By tracing the evolution of this term, as well as some of its correlates in English, I map the concept of “the visual as a literacy.”
This paper aims to explore a study that examines the role of academic librarians who teach visual literacy within their information literacy curricula.
While much has been written about visual literacy and multimodal teaching, almost nothing has been published on preparing instructors and graduate teaching assistants to provide students with the mechanics of visual design, rhetoric, and cultural criticism to help them build complex, multimodal projects that go beyond visual inclusion and critique. This chapter focuses on a graduate course on visual literacy, rhetoric, and design that was taught by one of the authors and taken by the other four.
This column explores the ways in which the new generation of librarians can position themselves at the front lines of the misinformation and “fake news” crisis by incorporating visual literacy and news literacy into information literacy lessons.
This work-in-progress seeks to benchmark the visual literacy skills of undergraduate mechanical engineering students at a small technical university, as well as the faculty’s current efforts to develop students’ visual literacy skills. Visual literacy is accepted as a crucial 21st century for students, professionals, and citizens, yet its definition varies greatly across the literature. In addition, existing assessment tools are too general and are insufficient for measuring visual literacy as it applies to engineering design. Our work seeks to establish a simplified method for assessing the visual literacy skills of graduating seniors in a mechanical engineering program.
Recognizing the relationship of keen observation to communication, critical thinking, and leadership in evidence-based literature, educators have expanded the use of art museums to augment visual intelligence skills. The purpose of this pilot intervention was to evaluate an innovative, interdisciplinary approach for integrating visual intelligence skills into an advanced communications and collaboration course. Collaborating with museum educators, the intervention for doctoral students was conducted at the National Gallery of Art. The aims were to explore and evaluate observation skills, use of intentional language in communication, impact of visual intelligence on perception, and role of visual intelligence with empathy.
The effectiveness of using video content for teaching and learning has mixed reviews, but some potential positive outcomes include students improving their creativity, experiencing higher levels of interaction, increasing self-efficacy, and engaging in meaningful reflection. This exploratory study examined how higher education instructors in philanthropic and nonprofit studies programs in the United States use video in their courses
Contemporary culture is a visual culture. Visual images become the predominant form of communication. Students should be visually literate and be able to read and use visual language, to decode, interpret and evaluate visual messages successfully, and, last but not least, to encode and compose meaningful visual communication. The combination of modeling with other methods in scientific knowledge increases its potential as a cognitive method. Infographics can play a significant role in the process as tool or target according to the age and cognitive abilities of the students.
Although Romanian school curricula introduce pupils from all grades to various forms of graphic representation, Romanian students do not get enough training in graph analysis as required by an IELTS exam because this specific competence is not particularly envisaged by the national curriculum for English as a foreign language.