Manifesto (in Helvetica, well on the web it's Arial) for Viz Cult @ Elon

Dear Members of the General Studies Review committee:

It is not enough to say, as we do often, that we live in an increasingly visual world.
First of all, some would argue we have always lived in “a visual world”.
And that, in fact, we have lived in even more visual worlds than we do now.
But no matter how visual our world today, there is no arguing that the visual is an essential way of making meaning.
Making meaning lies at the heart of all our academic disciplines.

A few years ago an interested group of faculty and staff from disciplines and departments as diverse as physics, business, history, economics, art history, english, art, religious studies, computing sciences, communications, instructional design and development, and the library got together to investigate visual culture as it pertains to our scholarly work, our teaching and our ethos at Elon. The resulting working group has collaborated to raise awareness of the significant impact of visual pedagogies on our campus and in academia -- and appropriate classrooms for them, the significance of research dedicated to visual culture, and the necessity for an educational core that develops visually literate global citizens.

Because of these reasons and others, the Visual Culture faculty-staff working group urges the General Studies review committee to consider the following statement as they review the General Studies curriculum at Elon.

To be critically literate our students need to be able to
interpret visual material,
construct knowledge in visual modes, and
understand how the visual is constructing them.

The membership of the Visual Culture working group ask the committee to consider:

• Curricular options that encourage multi-modal processes of inquiry and knowledge production.
• A practice of visual literacies that requires students to interpret and translate visual material with the same critical lens we ask them to apply to other types of texts.
• Encouraging this practice vertically and iteratively over the undergraduate career of our students and at increasingly richer and deeper levels, as well as across disciplines and curricular contexts.

We might suggest the following curricular models:

• Designated “Visual Literacy” (VL) courses across departments and at all levels but with shared emphases.
• Upper-level course offerings that foreground visual methodologies for inquiry or communication.
• A required visual-intensive element to 300-level GST courses similar to the intensive writing component already required.
• A model similar to that used for writing as communication (wac), such as a visual communication across the curriculum (vcac) program. Or an expanded version of the visual emphasis already included in Elon’s writing curricula.