Take5 #127 Visual Literacy

This blog is brought to you by Dr Jacqui Bartram who has presented on the topic of visual literacy several times at ALDinHE conferences over the years. It looks at how we, as learning developers, can take our existing expertise around academic arguments and adapt this to support students with assessment tasks that rely on more than just words.

Supporting visual literacy development

I have long advocated that as learning developers we need to be supporting students with developing their abilities to communicate with and critically approach visually rich materials; that is, develop their visual literacy. I have recently been privileged to become a Jisc Community Champion for my work in this area, especially in sharing this with our LD community – so thought this would be a great time to write a short piece outlining what I think this means for us as LDers.

First, in most circumstances at university, this isn’t just about images, but how these work in conjunction with text and words i.e. it is about multimodal communication. As part of a project with my colleague Dr Lee Fallin of this parish, I have been looking at the different sorts of assignments that we help students with that require them to demonstrate some level of visual literacy. The list is long and includes:

• Presentations (live and recorded)
• Posters (both academic and public facing)
• Information leaflets
• Infographics
• Docuslides (like Sway)
• Websites
• Magazine articles
• Blogs and Vlogs
• Short films
• Screen recordings
• Reports
• Visual essays

Some of these are not new, we are probably all reasonably comfortable supporting students with presentations and maybe with academic posters, but some may take many of you outside your comfort zone, especially if your background is in more text-oriented fields such as most types of information literacy or EAP. But, the move to ‘authentic’ assignments means these more visual assignments are becoming more prevalent and mainstream, especially as our academic colleagues battle with creating assessments that cannot (currently) be undertaken successfully by AI tools (if anyone has seen the free version of ChatGPT’s attempt at creating a PowerPoint slide deck you will see there is still some way to go before these would grade well).

Use your existing expertise

So, what is the best way to approach supporting students with these visually-rich assignments? Well, the best way is to approach it from what you already know – critical argument. LDers have already thought about how images can help us teach critical argument (see Alicja Siska’s excellent session available on LearnHigher: Excelling at critical analysis – a 3 stage model with an image) but how can our knowledge of critical argument help us support students with assignments that need more than words? Well, argument is still needed in such assignments; it is just that some elements of it will be presented visually. One way of thinking of arguments is to break them down into their three component parts—claims, evidence and attempts to persuade. 

These components of an argument can help us support visually-rich assignments.

Visuals can play an important role in all three. I give here just some of the ways they can be used and how we can help students use them well.

Claims are rarely entirely visual, in fact, they are usually textual, but visual elements can emphasise and clarify them regardless of the multimodal assignment format. For example, design choices like location, typography and colour can draw the eye to them and give them prominence. This is also true of structural visuals like lines, boxes and white/negative space. Further, using images such as icons alongside claims can help to clarify them (especially for a public audience who may not have English as their first language or who may have lower reading abilities).

The way students need to do this on different assignment types will change, but here is an example using a conference poster that picks up on some of these points:

How we can help as LDers: Ask students to think about what claims they are making and how they can be emphasised and clarified using visual means. Introduce them to ways of finding icons beyond those available through Microsoft (for example the Noun Project, Freepik or Flaticon) and the benefits of using SVG vector files over PNG files for scalability if possible. Also, if you are not comfortable with providing it yourself, help them find good advice on basic aspects of design so they make sensible choices regarding typography, colour etc.

Evidence is probably the easiest of the three elements of an argument to get your head around being visual. For many disciplines, direct visual evidence such as charts and graphs to visualise data are familiar ground. For others, illustrations or diagrams to clarify concepts/processes/ relationships, or photographs to illustrate real-world activities or situations may be more common. Students will also need to think about their audience though. Many of the assignment types listed above are aimed at the general public and they may not be as adept at reading charts and graphs for example, so simpler formats such as pictographs (repeated icons) may be more appropriate.

How we can help as LDers: Work with students to consider if there are more visual ways that they can represent written or numerical evidence (and which could work best). Help them with ways to find high quality illustrations and photographs without relying on Google/Bing image searches and ensure they are using these legally and ethically (in most circumstances, university work is exempted through ‘fair dealing’ in UK copyright law, but they may need to attribute creators for pieces designed for public display and at the very least reference them like their written sources). 

We can also encourage students to evaluate images when they find them – are they the best ones to use for their project? Does the style fit in with their general design? Are they a fair and reasonable representation (incl. culturally or socially) of what they want to show? Are they sure of who (or what) created them and their credibility?

Also, point them to tools they can use for creating their own images, especially diagrams. I find even introducing them to the pre-prepared diagrams of SmartArt in PowerPoint or Word can blow their minds! Again, giving, or signposting to, design advice is also useful here.

A screenshot of part of our online help with infographics, helping students decide how to visualise numeric data simply

Attempts to persuade can use visuals in a number of ways. First, they can get a piece noticed which is the first step to any attempt to persuade (think of posters with cross-the-room appeal or leaflets with pick-up-appeal due to interesting images on them). How well a piece is designed can also influence its credibility to an audience, so a coherent and professional finish can also be part of the overall attempt to persuade. When it comes to individual arguments within a piece, the attempt to persuade can go hand-in-hand with visual evidence. There is something inherently appealing and persuasive about photographs which can be leveraged. They can connect to and speak to an audience in ways that words often cannot – again especially where language may be an issue. Before and after photographs, or grids of photographs which can show connections or differences are particularly persuasive. Using text effectively to point out things within images and emphasise those connections is also part of visual literacy and needs careful consideration. In addition to photographs, diagrams can be used to show relationships between pieces of evidence and as with claims, icons can represent and draw attention to points made.

How we can help as LDers: Discuss with students how they can make their pieces more impactful and professional in design, again signposting if necessary. Have conversations about the rhetoric of images and how they can be powerful in arguments (and potentially over-persuasive or misleading too). Talk about ways of turning text into more visually interesting and persuasive designs. Get students to think about what text could be added as annotations or captions to help audiences understand what they are looking at and what it could mean.

Two slides from a section in a presentation looking at how to make text heavy slides more visually interesting

Drawing to a conclusion

Hopefully this has at least made you think about our role in supporting students with the increasing number of assignments that take them beyond the essay and other text-only pieces. Neither we, nor our students need to be expert in graphic design when approaching these assessments; just some basic knowledge, a critical approach and an enthusiasm for what multimodal communication can achieve will work wonders.

And finally, a shameless plug – watch out soon (hopefully next year – which is soon in publisher-land) for a book Lee and I are writing which looks at supporting students with these sorts of assignments (including other non-written examples like podcasts, where images can be conjured in the mind-eye). Watch this space…

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