Visual Literacy, Rhetoric, and Design at the Graduate Level

While much has been written about visual literacy and multimodal teaching, almost nothing has been published on preparing instructors and graduate teaching assistants to provide students with the mechanics of visual design, rhetoric, and cultural criticism to help them build complex, multimodal projects that go beyond visual inclusion and critique. This chapter focuses on a graduate course on visual literacy, rhetoric, and design that was taught by one of the authors and taken by the other four. Grounded in previous claims for visual literacy in the field, the authors open by introducing how and why students can be helped to develop visual arguments. It then introduces the graduate course, and 10 strategies for successful multimodal, project-based teaching, which are exemplified by graduate and undergraduate project examples. The chapter concludes with example assignments from two of the graduate authors and a call for a dedicated cross-disciplinary graduate course for multimodal pedagogy.