Visual Literacy Across the Curriculum: Thinking Big about the Role of Art History on Campus

Images are central to university-wide learning. We ask students to create PowerPoint decks and research posters and encourage them not to be too “text heavy.” Professors across campus illustrate their lectures with images, largely as a means of student engagement. Bulletin boards are filled with advertisements for clubs, talks, meetings. The creation and absorption of these images involves a set of unspoken skills that many assume are natural for our digital-native communities. This is, however, an erroneous assumption that relies on intuition rather than a carefully taught or scaffolded curriculum.

This paper would the results of a two-year collaboration between art history and our Faculty Development Center to explore how images are used in classrooms around campus and develop some basic visual literacy pedagogy to support instruction. In the process, art historical skills have been centered, drawing attention to and better understanding of our discipline and how it contributes to meaningful student learning. The cultivation of textual literacy or the importance of teaching students how to use texts as primary sources are seen as central to higher education, but no corollary understanding of visual literacy exists – this paper will challenge us to consider what a Visual Literacy Across the Curriculum program might look like and how it might help to challenge institutional assumptions about our field.