Silos are an undeniable and unavoidable reality of knowledge production, particularly within academia. For those who choose to navigate between disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to within them, it is not uncommon to find similar concepts developing in parallel in two or more completely different fields of study. These silos tend to be not just…

The visual reality of the world is often not reflected in the classroom experiences of students, creating little opportunity for them to learn how to be critical "readers" of the visual texts that fill their lives. After participating in a provocative summer workshop on Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the…

Years before the term "visual literacy" came to light in 1969 (Felten, 2008; Reis, 2013), British designer and art educator, Kurt Rowland, wrote, illustrated, and meticulously designed a series of art education textbooks called "Looking and Seeing." The intent was to teach visual awareness in a way that increased the capacity…

As a dance practitioner in education, Jason Ohlberg is interested in how artistic inquiry through interdisciplinary, student-centered processes can engage dancers beyond traditional choreographic practices and offer deeper contexts for learning and growth. The research described in this article began through an inter-institutional initiative,…

Democratic societies require a citizenry skilled in argumentation. At present, the written argument maintains primacy among communicative modes. Because of its cognitive demands, written argumentation is often difficult to teach. A multimodal approach to writing instruction carries the potential to assist struggling learners. This article outlines…

What are the possibilities for poetry? This paper introduces approaches to creating and teaching poetry through a critical survey of contemporary practitioners within the field. Analysis of ekphrastic traditions, comics and concrete poetry, artists books, graffiti poems, film, performance and interdisciplinary collaborations reveal new…

This article demonstrates how Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) art discussions and subsequent, inspired artmaking can help reach the goals of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, & Technical Subjects (CCSS-ELA). The authors describe how this was achieved in a remedial…

While diagrams make the text more visually appealing and provide an image of the text, they also do much more. Subsequently, the authors designed a series of lessons for students to discover the many purposes of graphics in science. A particular utility of these interdisciplinary lessons is that they are used with any science text featuring visual…

Like other literacies (textual literacy, numeracy), digital visual literacy (DVL) is the ability both to create and to understand certain types of information, in this case visual materials created with a computer. DVL is now essential in many daily life and workplace tasks, from looking critically at newspaper images or TV evening news to using a…

Anne Burke and Shelley Stagg Peterson argue that "picture books offer a medium for teaching visual and critical literacy across the curriculum." To support this idea, they describe a multidisciplinary unit on World War II that pushes high school students to utilize visual and print literacies to analyze, comprehend, and relate to public events and…

Observing that people are confronted with posters, billboards, video and other images more and more every day, this paper theorizes that the structure and principles of rhetoric can assist the public in understanding how visual images function and affect them. The paper presents a syllabus designed to assist rhetoric instructors in developing…

The application of digital storytelling to art education is an interdisciplinary, inquiry-based, hands-on project that integrates the arts, education, local communities, technology, and storytelling. Through digital storytelling, students develop and apply multiliteracy skills, aesthetic sensitivities, and critical faculties to address greater…

In terms of direct experience, students are limited to their immediate environment--unless that environment is expanded. A school of global education was therefore developed in the Livonia Public Schools (Michigan) to identify and implement ways by which this sought-after awareness could be incorporated into a secondary school multidisciplinary…

This paper discusses the relationship between "language" and "visual language." The paper describes two integrated teaching projects (children ages 4-11) in Croatia in which English as a Foreign Language and the visual language are presented as two potential common languages for young people to improve their communication in…

The inclusion of visual images in current educational literacy discussions tends to contextualise them within more semiotic, socio-critical and textually focussed theoretical traditions. These particular traditions privilege and emphasise the structures and "language-like" aspects of visual images, and include the broader social and…