Critical Visual Literacy Research Articles

The Full Circling Process: Leaping Into the Ethics of History Using Critical Visual Literacy and Arts‐Based Activism

In a time when adolescents are continually inundated by provocative multimedia campaigns that coax them to buy more, think less, and do so in a passive environment that provides little to no opportunities for them to reflect on who they are in the world, the author of this article offers one way to engage adolescents and their teachers with a process she calls full circling. Working with a variety of urban adolescents, university interns, and middle school teachers in urban settings, the author describes her four‐part process of connecting critical visual media—historically authentic photographs, paintings, drawings, and other visual documents—with more traditional fiction and non‐fiction texts, as she incorporates inquiry, reading, writing, educational drama, and “arts‐based activism.” The author explores a variety of ways to change current classroom paradigms as she reframes and repositions student learning using the tenets of her process.

The Relevance of Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology to Critical Visual Literacy: The Case of Scientific and Technical Illustrations

Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology is an underutilized, relatively unknown resource in technical communication which could be exploited not only for its potential clarification of large social issues that involve our discipline, but also specifically toward the development of a critical theory of illustrations. Applications of critical theory help strengthen our discipline by forcing us to delineate extant approaches and consider whether democratic goals are being achieved through those approaches. If a critical theory of illustrations can be built from Feenberg's critical theory of technology, it should be useful for classroom instructors and researchers as well as theorists.