Session 6a: Defining, Refining and Realigning

3rd Global Conference

Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

The Interplay of Visual Literacy and Teaching Approaches
Monika Raesch
Department of Communication and Journalism, Suffolk University, United Kingdom

Teaching a diverse student body challenges teaching staff to find methods that ideally engage all learners simultaneously, regardless of background, preferred teaching/learning methodology and ability. This is a qualitative study, taking place over the course of three school years. Various teaching methods were trialed that were relying on some form of and to varying degrees on visual literacy. Students in this pilot study were enrolled in A-Level courses at a college in the UK. Following most of the activities surveys were distributed to the students to evaluate the various approaches taken to develop the teaching materials further and to determine the importance of visual literacy on the learning process and progress. This paper discusses the use of a board game (a combination of the games Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit), of a team game (an adaptation of Family Feud), of two card games (individual play), and of the use of a projector and individual screens to teach students core concepts in the media and film studies field. The results of this pilot study are discussed in this paper and include, among others, that students seem to learn better and pay more attention when given some autonomy—for example, when provided with individual screens in a lab to follow a demonstration via remote desktop, students rated the instructor’s command of the subject matter and their own learning of the software and concepts more favorably than when being taught using a projector and shared screen. Limitations discovered were connected with visual literacy—for instance, students not being aware of the various connotative meanings a symbol on the game board held. Overall, the results suggest that even without actual individualization of teaching materials, resources can be created that provide students with the feeling of individualized learning materials and thus feeling more confident in one’s own abilities and involving themselves more in the classroom; but visual literacy is a key to having such materials succeed.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Open the Picturebook and Open the Children’s Heart: Visual Literacy as a Therapy
Hyeon-Kyeong Kim
The PLACE Research Group, Faculty of Education, Cambridge University, UK
Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea

These days, many children struggled with different cultures and different languages in the different nation from their home town. The language is key element to difficult to be adapted to new environment to the children. Especially, a new system of the language can makes children confuse to understand with the system of the mother tongue language to bilingual children. This stressful situation is also can be extended to the affective problem such as low-self esteem.
According to Styles, M. and Arizpe, E. (2003), many children responded ‘affectionately’ to the pictures during they read picturebooks. In addition, some pictures of the picturebooks gave comfort to the children.

This research explore to how the bilingual children struggled with language read and affective responses to the picturebooks. As a result, the process of the visual literacy of the picturebooks can help the children as a therapy would be investigated, qualitatively.

Korean children staying in the UK would be the objectives of this research. Their mother tongue is Korean and they are good at speaking Korean, but not at English. They are struggled with English and be stressful for this.

First of all, the investigator has a conversation with a child about his daily life for making up the rapport with the child. And then, each child read a picturebook with an investigator. During the reading, the responding to the picturebook and the conversation are recorded as a video files. After reading picturebooks, deeper interview would be progressed and children are asked to draw their picture to the express their thought and emotion about the picturebook. Interview with their children would be progressed regularly.

Picturebooks be chosen by the children’s situation, experiences, and interesting, with flexibility. But the contemporary postmodern picturebooks are considered if there is no special reason, because they have some characteristics of play, rich visual references, and the gaps that reader should fill with.

The Materializing Gaze: Gaydar and Cruising as Queer Visual Literacies
Gilad Padva
Tel Aviv, Israel

Sexual minorities, unlike racial and ethnic minorities, are a self-identified minority, and generally only recognize or announce their status at adolescence, or later. For decades, the gay community developed its unique vocabulary of fashion, accessories, regalia, jewels, tattoos and piercing that express its pride, and also enable its members to identify each other and create social, erotic and romantic relationships with their counterparts. As a result of the diffusion of gay subcultures into commercialized popular culture (e.g., the Metrosexual and the New Man trends), those visual signs are not sufficient anymore. Gay men, challenged by their cooptation by the mainstream culture industry, are developing an alternative “gaydar,” a sophisticated visual practice of speculation and identification. This article examines the formation and formulation of “gaydar” as a social practice of living and political being, which is strongly connected with the queer politics of the gaze. This same-sex objectification is interrelated with the commodification of desire in contemporary consumerist society. In Bobby Gibbs’ short film Gaydar (USA 2002), the identification of (homo)sexuality is instrumentalized as a sci-fi machine that enables its holder to recognize his counterpart’s erotic identity. At the same time, this film suggests that distinct sexual identification of desired objects “over-materializes” sexual fantasies and their categorization.

Group Painting Session: Pedagogical Tool for Cultivating Peace and Oneness among Students of Various Ethnic Orientations at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines
Joseph Reylan B. Viray
Visual Arts Office, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Manila

Group Painting Sessions are employed by a considerable number of professors and instructors who are handling Art and Humanities courses at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Sta. Mesa, Manila. This teaching methodology gathers students of various ethnic, religious, and regional orientations in one venue where the students are asked to participate, mingle and act in unity with each other to be able to come up with a work of art which truly manifests oneness and harmony. The paper attempts to present this pedagogy focusing on the following aspects: content; process or method; facilitation; acceptability; and effectivity to forge and cultivate oneness among students of various ethnic orientations. A Workshop Outline and Guide is likewise provided to help art instructors inspire and promote peace and social transformation via group painting session.