About us...
Our journey has been a life-long one, with each of us seeking out connections among a visual culture, technology, and learning.
Our journey has been a life-long one, with each of us seeking out connections among a visual culture, technology, and learning.
Dr. Rhonda S. Robinson
For Robinson, this journey began over three decades ago through an introduction to the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA). Robinson introduced a visual literacy course (ETT 531) to Northern Illinois University (NIU) in 1982, focusing first on improving instructional materials’ design and creation and later focusing more on visual concepts and skills for K-20 classrooms. The class has been taught continually since then, with many changes over the years based upon educational research, practice, and technology innovations.
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Elizabeth K. Anderson
For Anderson, an English instructor at a community college, an avid interest in gaming and immersive virtual worlds fed her need to understand visual composition, digital rhetoric, and multi-literacies. Taking Robinson’s visual literacy course in 2009 as a new doctoral student, Anderson discovered a field that provided theory and practice to inform her passions. As an independent study, Anderson worked with Robinson on a two-year project to revise the course for 21st century skills, gather data, and interpret the findings.
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Our Journeys
Robinson’s perspective: In order to expand the program in educational technology beyond basic instructional design methods and technology skills, a visual literacy course was introduced at NIU in the early 1980’s, developed to enhance the visual literacy of graduate student learners, and to improve their skills in instructional materials analysis, selection, design and creation. As the program evolved, the course focused more on visual literacy concepts and skills development for K-20 professionals and their learners. The class has been offered for graduate students annually since then, with many changes over the years based upon educational research, theory, practice, and technology innovations. The most recent redesign of this course is described and detailed in this chapter, which includes an exploration of visual literacy as an integral part of 21st Century multiliteracies, our pedagogical approach, the goals and outcomes and the many activities designed to achieve them, and the recent blended learning revisions and course assessments. We developed this class and continue to redesign it to help others examine the many aspects of the concept. Critical viewing skills, understanding culture through visual information, visual creation through technology, reading and writing visually, producing effective visual communication—no matter what activities we have stress in classed, our goals remain very consistent. We need active educators, designers, and members of our culture to help us create, examine and assess the impact visuals can make on our society, on our learning, and on our instructional design and teaching of others. We need to improve our abilities to not just see, but critically view our visual world. I believe that no matter what we are labeling these many important skills—visual literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, 21st Century literacy—all citizens need to be guided to improve their abilities to understand and communicate visually. The digital technologies of our times make this both easier than ever, and more vital than any time in our past.
Anderson’s
perspective: My interest in visual literacy
began in 1989, when I first taught English composition as a teaching assistant
at University of Illinois at Chicago. My students varied widely in readiness
for college writing, and many struggled with English as their second language.
When I discovered that many of my students had difficulties encoding rhetorical
principles (i.e., writing effectively for a variety of audiences and purposes),
I began to wonder about their decoding skills.
I had assumed that students read the assigned materials, thought about
them critically, and analyzed the rhetorical strategies used. It followed, I reasoned, that students should
next be able to apply such rhetorical strategies to their own writing. As a
young teaching assistant, I was dismayed to discover that my carefully selected
readings were largely unappreciated and that my students’ efforts in writing
continued to stagnate at a rather limited level. In mid-semester, I switched tactics. I
brought in a film that was still quite popular at the time, the 1977 original
Star Wars. I told students that this film was our text; I had their attention.
Since every student was familiar with the film, we were able to work through it
scene by scene, analyzing every detail from multiple perspectives. After
guiding them through the first two scenes, I let go. Students were able to
decode and analyze not only the rhetorical strategies used in the film but also
the cinematography and costuming. We
split into groups, prepared analyses, and debated. The class was engaged, and they
were beginning to think critically about all “texts” they encountered. Once
students were comfortable with decoding a variety of texts, encoding was not as
difficult. They had the analytical ability to assemble drafts and versions in
mental pictures; they could test ideas through verbal discourse before moving
to paper. We spoke of “essay shapes” and the silent “stage directions” of the
author as well as anticipating the audience’s preconceptions and playing with
assumptions. Students began to see that the audience of written texts can be
just as engaged and interactive as a film audience. Since that first semester
of teaching college English, I have employed a variety of unusual, mostly
visual texts to enhance students’ multiliteracy skills in both decoding and
encoding, and I have come to understand that visual and multiliteracies are
integral to critical thinking and thoughtful composition.