This chapter presents a case study examining the impact of visual literacy instruction on pre-service teachers. The study is contextualized within the Banned Books Week programming at an academic library. Considering the widespread presence of educational displays in schools, the authors focused on the social injustice of censorship to highlight the influence of school bulletin boards and classroom doors. The students engaged in two activities: first, a lecture and discussion about contemporary censorship in schools; second, explicit visual literacy instruction to prepare for creating their own educational display. Students implemented their designs on the classroom doors of the institution. The authors’ analysis of the decorated doors suggests a positive correlation between the instruction and visual impact of student designs. The authors recommend further efforts to offer visual literacy instruction in teacher education programs and additional opportunities for hands-on experience to cultivate a culture of social justice in schools and classrooms through educational displays.

Humans are inherently storytelling beings. From early childhood, narratives permeate our lives, encompassing a spectrum from imaginary tales and fairy tales to reality-based accounts. Throughout history, the content and modes of storytelling have evolved, reflecting distinctive aspects of each era. Visual narratives, integral to human communication, have manifested across time, from ancient cave drawings, hieroglyphics, and murals to medieval tapestries, modern graphic novels, and virtual interactive reality narratives. Storytelling serves as a crucial vehicle for envisioning diverse realities and imagining alternative futures. In this paper, visual literacy, including the abilities to create, share, understand, use, and analyze visual narratives, is discussed as a profound foundation for human communication. The discussion is framed within McFee’s work and her sociocultural approach to visual literacy, and artmaking. One conclusion is that art making can function as a democratic tool for reevaluating values related to equality and justice, thus acting as a catalyst for societal transformation. The content is elucidated through illustrations, crafted by the author.

Critical visual literacy is an important skill set for current and future educators, as well as preschool to 12th- grade students. It emphasizes critical analysis of visuals in their sociocultural context to evaluate power dynamics and plan for change. A team of three education faculty developed and implemented a critical visual literacy inquiry model in three graduate-level courses during the 2022-2023 academic year. The flexibility of this model allowed for the adaptation of different visuals and activities based on each course’s specific needs and its students. This paper explains the process of developing and implementing the model, offering insights and recommendations to enhance the teacher education curriculum. It aims to improve the knowledge of critical visual literacy for both pre-service and in-service teachers, empowering them to design culturally responsive learning experiences that cater to diverse student populations effectively.

The Community Game Development Toolkit (CGDT) is a set of tools that make it easy and fun for students, artists, researchers and community members to create their own visually rich, interactive 3D environments and story-based games without the use of coding or other specialized game-design skills. Building on the popular 3D game design engine Unity, the toolkit provides intuitive tools for diverse communities to represent their own traditions, rituals and heritages through interactive, visual storytelling. Projects can be built for desktop, mobile and VR applications. The toolkit is used to teach game design and interactivity at universities across the country, used by students, artists and researchers, and supported by several grants. This paper provides context about what kind of work students, artists and researchers have created using the toolkit and provides documentation for how to use the toolkit. See https://danielp73.github.io/Community-Game-Development-Toolkit/ for updated documentation and other information about the toolkit.

This chapter considers specific learning outcomes from centering students’ agency and growth via the process and perspectives of collage and assemblage. I argue that these actions empower students to arrange, array, and dialogue with disparate sets of information, creating a unique synthesis of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Collage questions authority, emphasizes process, asks open-ended questions, creates dialogue, and sets up an exploratory, questing dynamic. I ground these thoughts in visual literacy, culture, and theory with Deleuze and Guattari, McLuhan, Barthes, and hooks. I then illustrate these connections via several case studies, including information literacy sessions in new media, sculpture, and architecture.

Critical visual literacy develops the ability to investigate the social and cultural contexts of visuals to illuminate power relations. Artist-activist Violet Ray’s critical response to visual culture provides a potent example of how visual literacies can be activated to interpret and creatively confront received cultural imagery. Informed by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which considered power’s privileged manipulation of visual imagery as a tool of social and economic dominance, this paper considers Ray’s photo collages of visual protest as counterimages that subvert cultural value messaging through the juxtaposition of advertising and news photo source imagery. Viewed in relation to the Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education, this paper examines the methods by which Violet Ray’s confrontational collages pursue social justice through visual practice. Through this exploration, the paper contributes to the growing discourse on critical visual literacy, emphasizing its role in activism and the pursuit of social change.

In this research, we deal with the connective way in which art can meet history in terms of methodology and multiliteracies. The historical framework of this study is the Renaissance in Flanders, the Dutch Golden Age, humanism (16th & 17th centuries A.D.), and the influence of Greco-Roman antiquity. Our aim was to determine if students can use Flemish paintings as an educational medium in order to selectively expand their visual and historical knowledge as they interpret portraits historiques (portraits of noble persons in mythological disguise). We examined the students’ observation-interpretation of these paintings and the way they could exhibit the development of visual-historical literacy. Within this study, we followed basic assumptions of Perkins (visual part) and Moniot (historical part). The case study method used here included 12-year-old students of a Greek primary school. Qualitative content analysis was performed on data from student interviews and student text production. Regarding the findings, students’ reading and interpretation of the image seemed to strengthen their visual literacy development, which in turn helped their historical literacy acquisition through a method of observing and comparing information.