Visual Pedagogies

This international collection presents theoretical, empirical and practice-led considerations of what can be envisioned as visual pedagogies, offering classic, creative, and contemporary re-workings of these paradigms. In complementary yet overlapping parts, this book explores understandings of visual pedagogies as learning with, through and/or about images, visual and digital environments, embodied performances and immersive experiences. As visual practices in academia gain momentum, the need to navigate visuality in ways that enhance sensibility and awareness of how/what we observe, analyze, criticize and reflect on in any given moment continues to grow. We understand visual pedagogies as nomadic in the sense that the how and the what of image centered learning is not separable. What does this mean? First it means recognizing pedagogical practices as always already implicated. In other words, the form itself carries its own message. Visual pedagogies respond to, and are actualized within, the cultural contexts in which they are working. At the same time, they carry the possibilities of being taken up in diverse ways beyond one particular context. As living morphing practices, visual pedagogies expand on contextual affordances, while at the same time providing the means of exceeding them. Thus there are folk-literacies in perpetual movement that are producing visual pedagogies where points of traction for theorizing and research can form. These then can be mobilized as springboards for analysis and examination of how visual pedagogies become apparent. This book takes up multiple diverse contexts through an international selection of authors. The parts work to address conceptual, empirical and practical considerations through different emphases, yet in conversation with each other.