ARLIS/NA Lunchtime Chats

"Visual Literacy in Your Library" with moderator Barbara Rockenbach

September 18th, 1:00pm Eastern

Click here to read the transcript of this session

Description

Visual literacy is a key tool that information professionals can and should use to insert ourselves into the larger conversations on campus on topics such as:

the Digital Humanities
New Media
21st c. literacies
Web 2.0, and
the future of teaching and learning.

Just in the last decade, an abundance of visual materials have become available digitally that humanists and social scientists have begun to integrate into their teaching and learning. Yet, most of these professors in these disciplines and their students do not have training in using the visual.

There are conversations all over campuses and across disciplines about competencies and life-long learning skills that students need that involve understanding the visual world in which they live. Visual literacy is a skill or set of skills that we are uniquely positioned to teach. Visual Literacy is a tool for us to prove our value and to become involved in some of these larger, exciting conversations about the future of student learning.

Food for Thought

"The problem is that there is no logical place in current curricular models or college/university faculty charts to locate core, nonspecialized coursework that unifies the acquisition of a basic new-literacy skill set: Who is prepared to offer introductory-level, required coursework that encompasses a critical introduction to the static visual (e.g., photography) and the verbal and the moving images and the sound and a bit of graphic design to teach students to author well-argued, well-researched, and well-organized digital publications suited to a networked, online world?"

From: John Weber. "Thinking Spatially: New Literacy, Museums, and the Academy" EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 1 (January/February 2007): 68–69.

Many university writing centers include visual literacy tutorials and other types of course support on their websites. Here are just a few examples:

Visual Rhetoric and Strategies of Persuasion (Stanford University)

Visual Rhetoric/Visual Literacy - Writing about film (Duke University)

Viz (UTAustin)
"Viz explores the many ways rhetoric, visual culture, and pedagogy interact with and inform each other."

Writing the Art History Paper (Dartmouth Writing Program)

Librarians have also written research guides on the topic. Here are just a few examples:

Emory, Theology Library

Cal State, Fresno, Henry Madden Library

Duke University, Lilly Library