Visual Literacies: 2007 Conference Session 9

Visual Studies: An Evaluative Tool for the Images of Science
Bernadette McCarthy
The National University of Ireland, Cork, Ireland

The objectivity and impartiality of scientific images appear unquestionable. They convey information, make elements of the world more “real”, and operate in an evidentiary way offering a kind of proof. Given the pervasiveness of images in the various science disciplines, a high level of visual literacy has always been essential among its students and practitioners. Training in the making and skilful interpretation of images is necessary. In keeping with the supposed objectivity of the sciences, an impartial professionalism is assumed in this context.
In this paper, I will challenge the assumption that scientific images are free of political and social influence. I will take scientific images ranging from cartography to the biosciences, through visual examination, into the arena of the social and political where value perception can shape reality. My enquiry into their graphic composition will illustrate connection to unintended or, sometimes, intended links with non-scientific meaning. It will focus on the implications of these effects. Close study of this kind operates to expose fault lines in claims of scientific truth. It will show how Visual Studies’ methodologies can act as a kind of counterweight, a framing evaluative tool for qualifying the claims implicit in powerful scientific images.

Mapping meanings on a picture book’: a multi-modal, social semiotic view of children’s visual work in an art gallery/school project
Sophia Diamantopoulou
School of Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

Children’s drawings and graphic ensembles (drawings and texts) have been widely used in the field of museum and art gallery education as indicators of learning, as well as a means for evaluating and assessing the learning provision that takes place in settings beyond the school.
This paper will examine some of the children’s graphic ensembles that emerged out of an arts and literacy project, not only as a significant end-product of a creative partnership between a school and an art gallery; it will further look at the various phases of children’s work as instances of an on-going process of meaning making and transformation of the resources made available to them in a particular context.
The visual data for this presentation are drawn from an action research project initiated by Tate Britain as part of their ‘Ideas Factory project’. This is an arts and literacy programme delivered in partnership with artists, writers and teachers. The research looked into the impact of an ‘integrated approach’ towards the use of art works, on children’s school literacy.
The framing of the programme’s activities enabled the children to use image as the main resource for representing the meanings they wanted to make about their story at different stages of its production; from its conceptualization, to its drafting and its final emergence as a picture book.
This presentation will examine the production of the story books and their associated preliminary image and written drafts, as a literacy events. These will be viewed through the lens of ‘multi-literacies’ and analysed through a multimodal social semiotic interpretative framework.
The children’s graphic ensembles will be looked at in conjunction with the written text, in terms of the following: the children’s choices and emerging interests; the possibilities that image and writing allow for; the transformations of the visual resources the children engage with; as well as the resources the images draw from in order to be realised.
The paper will argue that the children’s picture books are the realisation of two different views on literacy that permeated the particular framing of the programme of activities: the school one, which prioritized the ‘word’ and was oriented to the notion of literacy as writing a narrative, and the art gallery one, which fore- grounded the image and a notion of literacy as visual. Both of these views are characterised by the particular resources they make available to the children. It is the combined effect of these views and the transformation of these resources that is mapped on children’s graphic ensembles.

Education for Tomorrow: Youth Design a Social Change Videogame
Farah Malik
New York, USA

This paper presents an overview of the collaborative project that resulted in a videogame and surrounding education and awareness campaign- ICED! I Can End Deportation. ICED came about out of a collaborative initiative coordinated by Breakthrough, a Human Rights education NGO that uses visual media; various community based organizations; High School teachers and more than a hundred students from across high schools and after school programs in New York City.
Outlining the process and creation of ICED**, a youth-designed videogame focusing on real-life experiences of race in the city, the paper gives insight into the development and design of the game- starting with the need for and goals of the project, moving to research aims and design and development, and then to describing focus group, beta-testing and implementation and integrations phases.
Students participated in skill building, design and conceptualization workshops that allowed them to not only creatively explore and learn about issues of racial justice, but also gave them an opportunity to be agents in the active production of alternative media. Consequently, then, this presentation also sheds light on the manner in which workshops allowed student participants to:
-learn about the software skills necessary to make videogames and to discover videogames as an avenue towards education for social change;
-discover new channels for expressing complex social issues;
-encounter real-life testimonies and narratives of racism and immigrant struggles;
-partake in story-telling and representing the experience of minorities in urban neighborhoods;
-help educate their peers on a critical and timely human rights issue;
-learn collaborative engagement towards media development.
Youth themselves actively controlled the: creation of characters based on real-life youth stories; the design of virtual city scenes based on their own experiences in public space as well as with policing, and the story-boarding and scripting process.
The paper proceeds to reflect on the lessons that emerged from this creative process and offers recommendations for an effective education campaign strategy that has a life beyond the classroom. A select few of the hundred students involved in this project went on to form "marketing consultant clubs" and have taken ownership over the 'distribution and dissemination' of the videogame. A discussion is provided on how through the use of the Internet, youth networking and media websites like Myspace, Youtube and online partnerships with entities like Itunes and the MTVthink website, an education campaign surrounding a videogame or any visual media product can be effectively carried out.

** ICED! I Can End Deportation is an online 3D Role Playing Game aimed at voting age youth (High school and college age students). With it’s street and graffiti style, ICED teaches the player about the current U.S. policies around immigration that destroy families and violate fundamental human rights. The game enables the player to inhabit the precarious day-to-day experiences of an immigrant circumscribed by the constant threat of detention, and more than likely, deportation. As the player navigates the city, he or she must avoid constantly spawning police officers (BOTS) and also make consequential decisions as well as answer myth & fact quizzes about current race-related and immigration policies in the U.S. If the player chooses incorrectly, he/she increases his or her chances of being teleported into detention. Once in detention, the player endures both physical separation from his/her family and unjust conditions while awaiting, often for unknown amounts of time, the random outcome of his/her case.