Visual Thinking Strategies


Book Description

2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice "What’s going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.







Visual Literacy


Book Description

Visual Literacy examines how teachers can use visuals to improve learning for all students. It provides teachers with a foundation in visual literacy, defined as the ability to read, think, and communicate with visually presented information. Results of studies of students’ using visual information indicate that most students are clearly lacking in the tools needed to use visuals effectively. The book orients teachers to visual literacy and the world of visuals. It discusses various classroom tested strategies and activities for all students, including second language learners, and students with special needs. Stressing visual literacy skills helps students understand a visual more deeply so they can master the content they are learning. Teachers will learn to employ a literacy triad of reading, thinking, and communicating to aid students in their study of visuals. First, they inquire into the visual, reading it for content and context, including assessing the authenticity of the document. Second, they think about the document by analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating it to come up with answers to their inquiry. Graphic organizers help students decipher the content and understand the meaning of the visual document, connecting it to prior and future instruction. Third, they communicate their findings using visuals.




Learning and Visual Communication


Book Description

Originally published in 1981, Learning and Visual Communication is about how to use visual communication in education. It offers visual forms of communication. In order to do this it draws on recent research - at the time of publication - in psychology, philosophy, semiotics, cultural analysis, education and media studies. Visual thinking, the key concept of the book, is defined in psychological and philosophical terms. It is placed in its cultural context and it is argued that it has not received the attention that it deserves in our educational system, which is dominated by literacy and numeracy. This is despite the increasing use of visual communication as an aid to learning and as a source of basic data in a whole range of disciplines such as physical science, geography, history and anthropology amongst others.




Visual Literacy


Book Description




Visual Thinking for Information Design


Book Description

Visual Thinking for Information Design, Second Edition brings the science of perception to the art of design. The book takes what we now know about perception, cognition and attention and transforms it into concrete advice that students and designers can directly apply. It demonstrates how designs can be considered as tools for cognition and extensions of the viewer's brain in much the same way that a hammer is an extension of the user's hand. The book includes hundreds of examples, many in the form of integrated text and full-color diagrams. Renamed from the first edition, Visual Thinking for Design, to more accurately reflect its focus on infographics, this timely revision has been updated throughout and includes more content on pattern perception, the addition of new material illustrating color assimilation, and a new chapter devoted to communicating ideas through images. - Presents visual thinking as a complex process that can be supported in every stage using specific design techniques - Provides practical, task-oriented information for designers and software developers charged with design responsibilities - Includes hundreds of examples, many in the form of integrated text and full-color diagrams - Steeped in the principles of "active vision, which views graphic designs as cognitive tools - Features a new chapter titled Communicating Ideas with Images that focuses on a new emerging theory of human cognition and how that theory, which deals with the construction and refinement of predictive mental models in the mind, provides a solid foundation for reasoning about what should go into a presentation




Writing and Literature


Book Description

In the age of Buzzfeeds, hashtags, and Tweets, students are increasingly favoring conversational writing and regarding academic writing as less pertinent in their personal lives, education, and future careers. Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking and Communication connects students with works and exercises and promotes student learning that is kairotic and constructive. Dr. Tanya Long Bennett, professor of English at the University of North Georgia, poses questions that encourage active rather than passive learning. Furthering ideas presented in Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First-Year Composition as a complimentary companion, Writing and Literature builds a new conversation covering various genres of literature and writing. Students learn the various writing styles appropriate for analyzing, addressing, and critiquing these genres including poetry, novels, dramas, and research writing. The text and its pairing of helpful visual aids throughout emphasizes the importance of critical reading and analysis in producing a successful composition. Writing and Literature is a refreshing textbook that links learning, literature, and life.




Visual Thinking


Book Description

Provides information on ways to help students communicate in a visual world.




Handbook of Visual Communication


Book Description

This Handbook of Visual Communication explores the key theoretical areas in visual communication, and presents the research methods utilized in exploring how people see and how visual communication occurs. With chapters contributed by many of the best-known and respected scholars in visual communication, this volume brings together significant and influential work in the visual communication discipline. The theory chapters included here define the twelve major theories in visual communication scholarship: aesthetics, perception, representation, visual rhetoric, cognition, semiotics, reception theory, narrative, media aesthetics, ethics, visual literacy, and cultural studies. Each of these theory chapters is followed by exemplar studies in the area, demonstrating the various methods used in visual communication research as well as the research approaches applicable for specific media types. The Handbook serves as an invaluable reference for visual communication theory as well as a useful resource book of research methods in the discipline. It defines the current state of theory and research in visual communication, and serves as a foundation for future scholarship and study. As such, it is required reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in visual communication, and it will be influential in other disciplines in which the visual component is key, including advertising, persuasion, and media studies. The volume will also be useful to practitioners seeking to understand the visual aspects of their media and the visual processes used by their audiences.




Handbook of Research on K-12 Blended and Virtual Learning Through the i²Flex Classroom Model


Book Description

Teaching models that focus on blended and virtual learning have become important during the past year and have become integral for the continuance of learning. The i²Flex classroom model, a variation of blended learning, allows non-interactive teaching activities to take place without teachers’ direct involvement, freeing up time for more meaningful teacher-student and student-student interactions. There is evidence that i²Flex leads to increased student engagement and motivation as well as better exploitation of teachers’ and classroom time leading to the development of higher order cognitive skills as well as study skills for students' future needs related to citizenship, college, and careers. The Handbook of Research on K-12 Blended and Virtual Learning Through the i²Flex Classroom Model focuses not only on how to design, deliver, and evaluate courses, but also on how to assess teacher performance in a blended i2Flex way at the K12 level. The book will discuss the implementation of the i²Flex (isquareFlex), a non-traditional learning methodology, which integrates internet-based delivery of content and instruction with faculty-guided, student-independent learning in combination with face-to-face classroom instruction aiming at developing higher order cognitive skills within a flexible learning design framework. While highlighting new methods for improving the classroom and learning experience in addition to preparing students for higher education and careers, this publication is an essential reference source for pre-service and in-service teachers, researchers, administrators, educational technology developers, and students interested in how the i2Flex model was implemented in classrooms and the effects of this learning model.