Update and Requests

Hi Viz Culters.

A few quick remarks.  

1. We are not meet this coming Thursdays (as I had once suggested) because there will be another GST forum during our meeting time.   Please consider attending this (and other) GST fora as we would like to find ways to intersect our interest in Viz Cult with the revised curriculum (when appropriate).

2.  We would like to get a better sense of the range of faculty, disciplines, and courses engaged or at least interested in visual issues.  I’ll be sending out an email in the next few days/week asking you a few questions about your role (or desired role) in working with visual culture at Elon.  I would appreciate your help with this matter.  We had some really wonderful energy at our last meeting and the time seems “right” to try to get something more formal going. 

3. In the short term, I’d like to start gathering a database of classes in visual culture so if you are teaching a course in the spring you would consider to be “intersecting with visual culture” please send me the name, title, and course day/time.  A brief description would be welcome, but for now the basics are enough.  I will compile these and make them available to our group for advising, but also — and perhaps more appropriately — for opportunities to connect faculty and expertise across campus. 

I’ll be in touch soon to reschedule our meeting.  Until then please keep sending me conference and speaker announcements!

All the best,

Evan 

Viz Cult Meeting -- Agenda

Viz Cult Meeting: September 20, 2010 4:15 Arts West

1. Welcome: Who are we?
2. Introductions:  Who are you and what have you done with Viz Cult?
3. Discuss goals and dreams for 2010-2011:
• Chose texts for our working group meetings.
• Propose a Common Reading.
• Discuss how Viz Cult might work with the GST review.
• Choose a future for Viz Cult.  
• "In 2012 will we be:"
• a CATL working group? 
• A PERCS-esque program? or a PERCS-esque program with clusters of classes? 
• A minor?  
• An institute with an awesome "billion dollar" building? 
• Should we propose a classroom design template for visual pedagogy? 
4. Set next meeting time/place.
• Thursday October 28th at 4:15 may be a GST review forum.

Viz Cult Meeting, Thursday, Sept. 30th 4:15, Arts West

Hi Everyone,   

If you are receiving this email you are either a devotee of Viz Cult, or you requested to be added to our list-serv, or someone told me to add you to our list-serv, or you seem like you might like visual culture so I added you myself.  

This is a reminder of our “meeting” this Thursday afternoon at 4:15 in Arts West.  Let’s meet in the lobby, but we’ll probably end up Room 126.  I used scare quotes around meeting because, really, what does anything actually “mean”, and because it’s more of a gathering than a meeting.  We will have wine, cheese, fruit and chocolate (or something of the that ilk) and we will introduce ourselves as consumers, producers, historians and “analysists” of visual culture (see now I can’t be stopped with the scare quotes). 

I will also take suggestions at this meeting for our next “text”.  This can be an actual essay, a work of art, film, website, anything that you think deserves our attention as we spend this year figuring out what viz cult @ elon should be.  I have LOTS of ideas, so you will want to bring ideas simply to stop me from getting my way!   In addition to introducing ourselves, I’d like us to start considering the following questions:   

Do we want to consider a Viz Cult curriculum?  

Do we want to consider promoting clusters of classes?  Even if that’s not something that Elon will adopt as part of the GST review, it’s something we could promote among interested students. 

Should we propose a classroom design template for visual pedagogy? 

Do we want to sit in the corner, wear a beret, drink wine and scoff at what’s not happening?  Well, yeah.  

Anyway, please join us Thursday.  

Bring your brains and eyeballs and let’s get started.  Questions or concerns?  Drop me an “electronic mail”  (egatti@elon.edu)

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.
  

Letter for the GST review committee/Declaration of the "Year of Viz Cult"

Everyone,

Welcome new peeps, glad to have you here. Yeah, whatever oldies.

So we are still planning on a meeting in Arts West at 4:15 on September 30th, with whining, yeah you know what that means (and if you don’t — I’ll give you a hint, that means there will be refreshment), but I thought it might be best to go ahead and circulate a draft of a letter we have been working on to send to the GST review committee.

The letter (or manifesto in helvetica, as I have nicknamed it) asks the committee to consider the following statement as they review the General Studies curriculum:
“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.”

It would be better to get this letter to the committee sooner rather than later so I am attaching a copy of the draft here. I welcome comments, suggestions, additions, omissions between now and Tuesday morning, September 14th. After that time I will edit what we have and get it in the hands of the review committee.

It’s going to be a good year for viz cult. In fact, I declare this “the year of viz cult” That’s howe good it’s going to be.

Best,

Evan

Like a phoenix fron the ashes... Viz Cult!

Welcome back to the school year. Yaaaaa, wooooo, ahhhhhh!
You’ll be happy to know Viz Cult (or the Visual Culture Working Group, for the more formal of you) is back! And we’re going retro...

When Viz Cult first began it was a reading/working group. Faculty and staff suggested readings or brought “text” of any kind for the group to discuss in order to develop our understanding of and broaden our perspectives on what’s possible in the study of Visual Culture/Studies/Literacy/Stuff. We’ve since moved on to pedagogical concerns and technologies, and we’ve even suggested a Common Reading, but it’s time to step back and ask: “So, where (or what) are we now?”

What is visual culture?
Is is culture, contexts, content?
How many of us are doing “it”?
What is its role in our scholarship, our teaching, our curricula?
What should it be?
Do we need t-shirts?

If these are questions that interest you, please come to the next Viz Cult meeting on Thursday, September 30th from 4:15-5:30 to be held in ArtsWest 102J (there is lots of end of the day parking, so come on down). Snacks and intellectual stimulation will be provided.

Suggestions for texts (of all kinds) are welcome. I’ll send an update once I have suggestions. Links to the text will be posted on our blog.