Critical Visual Literacy Research Articles

Discurso de memes: (Des)memetizando ideologia antifeminista

RESUMO O objetivo deste trabalho é discutir a necessidade de se pensar os memes a partir da perspectiva de um letramento visual crítico. Mais especificamente, buscamos analisar como os memes são utilizados em práticas sociais instauradoras ou mantenedoras de relações de dominação de gênero e explicar como a ideia de um letramento visual crítico pode ser útil para se contrapor a esse tipo de fazer discursivo. Desenvolvemos essa discussão à luz dos conceitos de multiletramentos, de letramento visual crítico, da Teoria Social Crítica e das metafunções da linguagem visual.

Exploring the Impact of Discourses in Advancing Visual Literacy:A Case of Interpreting Advertisements

When interpreting advertisements during visual literacy lessons, both teachers and learners draw from powerful discourses that are socially acquired. This article seeks to explore how these discourses enable or constrain the advancement of visual literacy education when teachers and learners interpret advertisements in English First Additional Language lessons. The argument draws on data collected from segments of two teachers’ lessons in interpreting advertisements. Insights from cultural historical activity theory and the interdependence model of critical literacy have been used to analyse this data. The findings indicate that teachers achieved the necessary cognitive shift from visual literacy to critical visual literacy, but face challenges in critiquing texts and in recognizing the reconstruction of unequal social structures.

Representing Gender: Visual Literacy Instruction in the Academic Library

Abstract 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.

Teaching Critical Visual Literacies through #Selfies

This qualitative, ethnographic case study investigated the use of selfies in the development of middle school students’ critical visual literacy skills in the digital age. The data collected included the students’ selfies and the video/ photo recordings of the students during their selfie creation and analysis processes. Data was coded thematically (Charmaz) and analyzed using critical visual methods discussed in Rose’s An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials and also using visual narrative analysis (Riessman), with a focus on creative production, community sharing, and critical deconstruction. Findings from the study indicate that a lesson on selfies can encourage reflection, critical thinking, and effective communication—twenty-first-century skills and competencies.

Digital humanities, middleware, and user experience design for public health applications

Technical communicators should be conscious of how the algorithms that govern "middleware" (software that structures the presentation of data) constrain their ability to represent information. We use critical theory from the digital humanities to discuss how critical visual literacy allows designers to better present contextual information to enhance the user experience. We illustrate this approach with an example of medical communication by using social network analysis software to demonstrate the spread of Ebola in Africa.

Hit over the head with hegemony: relations of power in Japanese and Taiwanese English school ads

With the commodification of English education in East Asian societies, a robust advertising industry has arisen to attract consumers. In the project described here, I engaged in a critical content analysis of over 1000 advertisements for English educational products and services collected in Japan and Taiwan. My focus was on how social groups are portrayed in the visual components of these Ads. Results indicate that this imagery served to place individuals into positions as ‘owners’ or ‘consumers’ of the commodity of English by virtue of factors such as national origin and race, while also sidelining others through invisibility. Such results imply the ongoing workings of powerful beliefs associated with English tending to cement traditional hegemonies. Thus, this research supports the call for heightened attention to critical visual literacy in education while at the same time suggesting a need to redouble efforts to disrupt relations of dominance within English education.

Break the Stereotype! Critical Visual Literacy in Art and Design Librarianship

The authors consider an approach to visual literacy instruction that is rooted in the philosophies and practices of critical librarianship and feminist pedagogy. They explore the extent and limitations of existing standards, frameworks, and pedagogical models to support an idea of critical visual literacy, particularly in the context of art and design schools and creative career-focused institutions. By examining practices and examples from other disciplines, the authors identify strategies for teaching critical visual literacy in context. These pedagogical models inform the design and revision of two workshops for art and design students.

The Challenges of Teaching Visual Arts: The Case of Moroccan Higher Education

Visual studies are imparted as majors in many western institutions. This concern with visual culture stems from the vital role of images in communication and how they shape the mindset of the global citizen. Moroccan academia has recently introduced such discipline in some departments in order to modernize the curricula and enhance a liberal education. However, socialization and the dominant local culture favor a more conservative perception of images. The paper explores how these converging narratives operate and how students react to some modern values such as body politics, freedom of expression, subjectivity, etc. The last concern of this study is to analyze to what extent images interrogate and disrupt traditional norms and perceptions and contribute in developing students’ critical thinking, visual literacy, modernist perspectives, intercultural communication and mindfulness. The paper is a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods. It is first grounded in the postmodern theoretical framework, but it is also based on a four year teaching visual arts experience, classroom observation, and questionnaires. The ultimate aim of this paper is to share some findings with other practitioners, to address the impediments and challenges of university education and to contribute in designing modern curricula that smoothly prepare the students to embrace multicultural values.

Comic heroes or saviours? Constructing alternative identities in a social critical approach to the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Current educational systems primarily focus on the verbal and logico-mathematical aptitude of students, thus neglecting the cultivation of visual literacy and critical literacy skills, although the ubiquity of images in school textbooks necessitates the inclusion of a ‘visual grammar’ metalanguage in educational practices. The aim of the present paper is to present and analyse how a group of eighteen sixth grade students of an EFL classroom in a state primary school in Thessaloniki managed to ‘deconstruct’ the depiction of superheroes/heroines in comic books or action movies, in an effort to represent them in a more humane and mundane way, where their super powers are summoned to the advantage of a society in need. The overall organization of the instructional intervention is built on an introductory phase, a main phase and a follow-up phase. The analysis of the students’ compositions relies on the application of the principles of critical visual literacy and the results display that through the process of scaffolding, the students can reject dominant representations of power and reconstruct cliché identities by re-exploring pre-existing roles. The end result, that is the classroom calendar compiled by twelve multimodal texts, manifests the students’ skilful utilization of both visual and verbal semiotic resources in a balanced way, with a view to transmitting their social messages taking into account the broader social, cultural and political context within which power relations and social roles constantly evolve and are constructed.

(Re)producing difference: the pedagogy of graphic narratives for critical visual literacy

Flicking through anonymous responses from my preservice teacher class after finishing a session associated with sexuality education my eye caught the words ‘for goodness sake just call the parents ...

Book Review: (Re)Thinking Orientalism: Using Graphic Narratives to Teach Critical Visual Literacy

This article purports the idea that summer programs that experiment with media literacy and social-emotional learning could potentially affect students’ academic performance. Based on a six-week program, working with rising eighth grade students in a low-income school district, this program allowed students to work on media projects while trying to develop stronger capacities of self-awareness, positive decision-making, and stronger relationship development. The article intends to offer practitioners in media studies and pedagogy, insight of how to implement social and emotional learning into media classrooms.

Alfabetización visual crítica y educación en lengua materna: estrategias metacognitivas en la comprensión lectora de textos multimodales

In the context of today’s changing sociosemiotic landscape of discourse interactions, in this paper we outline a proposal for critical visual literacy of multimodal texts in language education. Two models are used to analyze a single text; the first one, Magarinos (1991), offers the possibilities for thorough visual readings in nine relations that encompass form, existence and value. The other, a sociosemiotic model by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), breaks down the visual space into four quadrants that account for the ideal, real, new and given dimensions in the design of multimodal discourse. Results indicate that Magarinos’ model proved to be more effective in exploring signs and their overarching cultural meanings, as constructed in

Reading Images in American Born Chinese through Critical Visual Literacy

The author of this article conveys how teaching Gene Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese from a critical visual literacy approach enables students to gain a deeper understanding of Yang’s commentary on historic and modern stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans.

The case for formal visual literacy teaching in higher education

Visual literacy is crucially important in a contemporary society dominated by visual media, yet visual literacy teaching and education has not (yet) achieved sufficient recognition in terms of tertiary education curricula. One criticism against the use of social media technologies is the perceived inability of participants to distinguish between virtual and real worlds. This is the result of an education system that has not given adequate prominence to the development of critical visual literacy, but assumes that students will 'pick up' the necessary competencies along the way. The answer is not to try and resist the new paradigm of a mediated society where the virtual has increasingly taken the place of face-to-face human interaction, but to explore visual technologies in order to design subject-specific taxonomies of learning and appropriate methodologies for the teaching of visual semiotics. In this study poster elicitation was used to analyse data on visual literacy. The data were obtained from narratives written by 89 respondents after studying two posters about visual messaging. The data revealed that visual images do not constitute a universally understandable means of communication that function independently of language.

Evoking emotions and unpacking layered histories through young children’s illustrations of racial bus segregation

Drawing on theories of multi-modality and critical visual literacy, this article focuses on images that five-and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voice on the Bus, about racial segregation. The article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understandings of Rosa Parks’ bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural view focusing on images that five- and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voices on the Bus, about racial segregation, the article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understanding of Rosa Parks’ bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural (Kind, 2010) idea of art as an encounter, not as a fixed representation, shaped how the images were experienced for analysis. Using the notion of synaesthesia (the joining of senses), paintings were analysed for evoked emotions and blended sensations ( Berman, 1999 ; Boston, 2001 ). Additional analysis focused on sedimented meanings (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007), looking for traces from curricular conversations and local/global D/discourses about segregation, schooling experiences and religious undertones (Gee, 1996). The following analytical questions are discussed: In what ways does this illustration evoke a synaesthetic response? How is this image agentic? What are the sedimented meanings from the images? Insights gained are that children can create synaesthetic images to evoke emotions; educators can find traces of sedimented histories in student-made artefacts; and perhaps social action is embodied and expressed through art. Researchers are encouraged to continue using a hybrid of literacy theories and tools for multi-modal analysis.

Examining Markets, Marketing, Consumers, and Society through Documentary Films

Documentary film is over 100 years old and includes subgenres such as ethnography, historical film, docu-drama, propaganda, and advocacy videos. With numerous film archives, film festivals, special DVD issues of journals, inexpensive video recording and editing equipment, Internet distribution, and the phenomenal growth of archival Internet sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, there are now hundreds of millions of documentary films and videos available to the interested researcher. The author argues that the macromarketing field has greatly underutilized this vast resource and suggests examples of sources and uses for such material. The author also suggests some aids for acquiring critical visual literacy skills to inform such analyses. Just as we rely on our libraries and online access for books and print journals, we can readily do the same with documentary films. Such analytical projects can be presented as either video documentaries themselves, as text-based articles and books, or as multimedia combinations. Film, video, Internet, and television images arguably do more to influence public perceptions of marketing, consumption, and life than any other medium. There is thus a great opportunity to understand society through this window on the world.

The Hidden Curriculum of Wilderness: Images of Landscape in Canada

In this article, I offer an analysis of the Canadian relationship with the land as a point of departure for educators to consider personal modes of resistance so that the curricular goals of communal responsibility for the land, and understanding within and across differences can begin and continue to flourish. Because of the reality of increasing encounters with difference in schools, teachers and students need space to examine their epistemological and ontological grounding: how they come to know who they are in the time and place of contemporary life. Relationships with images of the land are cogent aspects of this kind of deep, reflexive inquiry and pursuit of these connections involves critical visual literacy. Through a consideration of some forces that shape the development and maintenance of national identity in Canada, I examine the influences of images of wilderness on contemporary, collective life. In this light, I trace the historical evolution of the landscape work of the Group of Seven painters to the level of national icon. The hidden curriculum of “wilderness nation” is an influence that runs counter to the realities of many students’ learning experiences in Canadian schools. I discuss the ways that the signifier of wilderness maintains hegemonic, discriminatory practices within schools.

Putting Humpty Dumpty together again: When illustration shuts down interpretation

When conventional illustrations tell readers what to imagine, critical visual literacy is compromised. The ideal relationship between illustrations and words in children’s picture books involves a relationship where neither dominates the other (Nodelman, 1988). But when illustrators lean on conventional images readers lose opportunities to interpret. Three avenues for critically re-examining the conventional visuals in the rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” are explored: historical analysis, questioning the text, and visualizing with other nursery rhymes. We can re-open closed interpretation, challenging the way powerful illustrations can shut down the visualization process.

Critical Visuality: On the Development of Critical Visual Literacy for Learners’ Empowerment

Critical Visuality: On the Development of Critical Visual Literacy for Learners’ Empowerment

Development of Critical Visual Literacy and Aesthetic Experience in Visual Communication: A Vision of Appreciation and Care for the Environment

Development of Critical Visual Literacy and Aesthetic Experience in Visual Communication: A Vision of Appreciation and Care for the Environment