This study explores the role of higher education professional development in the integration of visual literacy instruction at the university level. Visual literacy is a crucial skill that empowers students to comprehend and generate visual content across diverse domains. However, many instructors lack necessary training and support to effectively…

Contemporary pre-school education is shaped globally by media saturation culture. Given that children engage with multimodal textual practices in their everyday lives, there is a growing consensus that the concept of literacy should be expanded to encompass multimodal media forms and practices within formal educational contexts. A concrete part of…

This study explores the integration of key Transformative Learning Theory (TLT) principles into design education to foster Visual Literacy (VL) and promote awareness of environmental issues among undergraduate students. Through thematic analysis of 22 illustrated infographics, ideation sketches and supporting textual data created by art and design…

Visual literacy equips learners with the dispositions to critically create, analyse, use, and share visual information. As one component of a discerning, ethical citizenry, visual literacy has become more essential in a rapidly evolving information ecosystem. Against this backdrop, the current Association of College and Research Libraries Visual…

Using data from a qualitative case study examining how lynching is taught in schools near historic lynching sites, this article examines how lynching photographs were used or not used in the teaching of lynching. Using a pedagogy of witnessing as the analytic tool this article argues that lynching photographs were used in one of three ways:…

To prepare their students to navigate online information about current issues, teachers must be able to critically read a range of diverse and complex data visualizations. This study presents findings from task-based interviews with 25 social studies teachers on their instructional beliefs about the use of diverse data visualization types. In the…

Images are central to our understanding of and learning about our world. We argue that visual training needs to be improved in the higher education system to enhance the potential of visual thinking to mediate productively our relationship with the context we inhabit. Initiatives from the social sciences and humanities since the end of the twenty…

The use of concept mapping strategies has implications in teaching and learning to improve visual literacy. This study examined pre-service teacher education students' experiences and perspectives in relation to concept map creation and their use in education to promote visual literacy. The data analyzed for this study consisted of concept maps…

This study describes the ways in which 36 preservice elementary teachers (PSETs) incorporated text into slides (n = 158) they designed for use with K-5 students during whole-group mathematics instruction. A qualitative content analysis was conducted to determine the extent and purposes for which the PSETs used slide text. Overall, 80% of slides…

Visual literacy, which is the ability to effectively identify, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media, is an important aspect of science literacy. As molecular processes are not directly observable, researchers and educators rely on visual representations (e.g., drawings) to communicate ideas in biology. How learners…

The notion of scientific visual literacy has been advocated in recent science curriculum reform documents and related learning outcomes are expected from students. However, few studies have been conducted to determine how it is tested in high-stakes examinations. This study utilized the Visualization Blooming Tool to examine the level of visual…

Contemporary society is changing and evolving at a fast pace; children in our society are exposed to a plethora of information, which is both overwhelming and confusing to young minds. It has never been more crucial to help children navigate around the complexities of our world and support them in attaining the essential tools to help them on this…

This article provides a theoretical exploration of the connections between critical literacy and symbolic competence with some pedagogical examples from an empirical study. More specifically, we argue that critical literacy can be utilised as an approach to develop symbolic competence, and, by extension, encourage intercultural learning. Our…

One of the main purposes of the classroom-based research featured in this article was to develop 9-year-old students' visual meaning-making skills and competences by focusing specifically on elements of visual art and design in picturebooks. The complexity of the picturebook format requires and rewards slow looking by readers/viewers. However,…

In a contemporary society dominated by visual media, critical visual literacy (CVL) is a significant skill to inculcate, and yet, in some educational systems, its integration in teaching and education has not (yet) achieved enough recognition, especially in a context like Pakistan. As it is assumed that students will develop the necessary…