I See Therefore I Think

This chapter uses cognitive theory of information processing to demonstrate the role of visual learning in the context of reading and writing. According to the theory, individuals do not take a singular approach to processing information. Rather, they experience the world through visual and verbal channels. Information is then organized by working memory into more comprehensive models—the visuo-spatial sketchpad and the phonological loop. The author considers pedagogical strategies for writing instruction that rely on the multimedia principle, which states that our minds work best when learning combines the visual with the aural. The specific mission of the chapter is to show how the multimedia principle can benefit writing instruction in three different contexts: 1) reading and writing comprehension, 2) narrative writing, and 3) grammar usage. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that learning through images is not just a cultural phenomenon, but also a scientific one.

The Relation Between an English Language Textbook and a Teacher's Practice in a Brazilian Public School

Communication has become increasingly multimodal in contemporary society. This fact has prompted reflections on how pedagogical actions reflect these changes. In this chapter, the authors investigate the relationship between the multimodal approach of a textbook and the pedagogy of an English language teacher from a public school in Brazil. The theoretical bases of the study are Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), Jewitt (2008, 2009), Bezemer and Kress (2008, 2015), Callow (1999, 2006), among others. The study conducted by the authors is an ethnographic with descriptive and interpretative features. The main conclusions indicate that teacher's manual suggests adopting critical visual literacy, but it was not materialized in the activities. Both, teacher and textbook call students' attention to the images to teach language, rather than to explore critical visual literacy. They seek to develop the written code skill. Finally, the researchers suggest that textbooks should be designed and more pedagogical training about approaches that emphasize multimodal literacies should be promoted.

Unlikely Dinner Guests

This work opens a space where Visual Rhetorics, Cultural Rhetorics, Food Studies, Technical Communication, and Critical Race Theory can expand and work together to understand how visuals associated with racial and ethnic groups and their food products contributes to perception of cultures. This work is necessary because food product packages are largely unexamined spaces within the field of Rhetoric; however, because one image associated with a food product is so intimately connected with the home culture it has the potential to create, a single essentialized interpretation, of a group.

Picturing Writing

Whether an image is still or moving, created digitally or by hand, it has the capacity to communicate ideas and emotions that are often difficult for a student to actualize in their writing, especially in a culture where the image seems to have become more ubiquitous than text. Therefore, when the visual becomes a primary component of the composition class, students learn to literally and figuratively read and design their worlds and words in different ways. As Kress (2003) observes, “The world told is a different world to the world shown” (p. 1). The implications for the integration of a multimodal approach to college writing are rich with potential. Moreover, for the Millennial college writer who is thought to be underprepared, the less prescribed and more widely inclusive approach offered through multimodal social semiotic theories offers tangible, liberatory, and egalitarian ways through which the notion of deficit can be repudiated.

From Page to Screen

This chapter analyzes the practices and teaching philosophies underpinning a cross-genre graduate class: From Page to Screen. It discusses how transformative learning tools engage students in a progressive learning arc, moving from a traditional semiotic domain (classic literary short story) to a new semiotic domain (short film). It demonstrates the journey from theory to practice, wherein experimentation, collaboration and actualization produces a final “product” that is visual and performed, derived from a text-based literary form. The class trajectory is instructive for students needing to gain multi-modal skills for professional engagement where the writing and development of scripts are the bread and butter of the media world. The chapter asserts the need to look at all forms of communication in terms of their representation across different modes – linguistic, actional, and visual – that have different organization and meaning-making systems.

Self-Mapping

Self-mapping is a self-reflection paradigm in which the self-mapper, through self-produced images, documents their thoughts about intellectual journeys, professional/personal aims, courses of action, mapping milestones (“memes”), as well as the navigational points to achieve the goals. Self-mapping methodology places the “self-as-researcher” inside a creative process, in which the “self” identifies institutional requirements (e.g., toward candidature, promotion, publications, etc.) and symbolically visualises the progress toward identifiable end-goals. This chapter explores the importance of images and visual media in placing the self within contemporary instructional cultures of an individual's reality. It argues that the images are specific, purposeful, and personal rather than auxiliary to other forms of visual meaning-making. The process empowers self-mappers to participate in a visual culture of “a future self” that is of their own creation.

Using Eye Movement to Study Adolescents' Comprehension of Visual Texts

This research used eye movement tracking to study the ways adolescents decode and comprehend multimodal texts. The focus is on eye movement regression between text and picture to investigate how participants use the two-stage information-processing model when attempting to comprehend visual texts. Ten adolescents ranging in age from 14 to 19 were asked to read a series of different types of visually based texts. Specifically, they read six short excerpts from graphic novels that varied widely in the complexity of both textual and visual features. The narratives included graphic novels, graphic retellings of canonical texts, and wordless visual texts.

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.

I See What You Mean

The infographic represents a combination of visual imagery and big data, and it can be implemented successfully as a teaching tool across multiple educational settings. The infographic is also, by definition, a multimodal genre. It incorporates visual and textual elements, statistical evidence, research, graphic design, and digital literacy for both the creation and distribution of an effective data visualization through 21st century mechanisms of social action and interaction. In the following chapter, the authors, two instructors at a small, private, liberal arts university in the suburban South, will present examples of infographic curricula from undergraduate courses in first-year writing and professional writing in the medical humanities and analyze the effectiveness of this approach on student learning, particularly in relation to the impact of infographic instruction on the skills of synthesis, public resonance, transfer and social action.

A Place for Imagery in Composing Histories

This chapter discusses the affordances and constraints for the visual modes of meaning making at the Gettysburg Museum of the American Civil War. The past is remembered in terms of available memory tools, which effectively shape an understanding of history when carefully presented with context to an audience. Visual imagery at the museum presents material in ways that other modes cannot; however, it is dependent on other modes to set proper context during the audience's meaning making process. The museum at Gettysburg relies heavily upon visual modes to compose Civil War histories. The multimodalities (visuals, objects, texts) work synchronously as fragmented pieces of history to create a more whole understanding for the audience.