VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY
Abstract
Visual literacy is a practice rooted in traditional art history that has broad, but not often advertised, implications for transdisciplinary learning. Few people in higher education today doubt the need to reinforce skills of text-based literacy across the curriculum – and doing do has not threatened the intrinsic value of English courses. But while liberal arts institutions are intentional in the teaching of alphabetic literacy, there remains a persistent assumption that visual literacy is an intuitive skill. The skills of close looking, analysis, visual argumentation, and communication are not skills limited to art historical practice, nor do they comprise the totality of our work, but art historians do have expertise in helping students work with visual texts, crossing the boundaries between the textual and the visual. We know how to help students understand that images are not merely pictures or visualizations of data, but documents with relational meanings dependent on the circumstances of their creator and their viewer. Building on the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum model (which distributes writing instruction in designated courses that are dispersed across the campus), this presentation will share a theoretical framework that deconstructs some potential processes for teaching with images before arguing that the explicit teaching of visual literacy amplifies the mastery of disciplinary content while building highly transferable skills.
Dr. Sarah Archino, Associate Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina. With specializations in Dada and humor, she has served as the Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow and as Research Fellow for the Duchamp Research Center. In addition to publications on early 20th-century American art, she has also published on the teaching of visual literacy. Her current research continues to explore visual literacy instruction as a transdisciplinary skill set in the liberal arts environment.