Across the Disciplines, Vol. 5, Jan.- Dec. 2008

http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/visual/intro.cfm

Incorporating the Visual into Writing/Electronic/Communication/Learning Across the Curriculum
Guest Editor's Introduction
Joan A. Mullin, University of Texas at Austin

Today, "writing" has come to represent for us the more realistic variety of communications across the curriculum: the oral, spatial, electronic—the visual and multimodal.

...the use of the visuals in classrooms provides for us who write in this issue a particularly effective pedagogy that effectively teaches students to think about, engage in, "see" communication.

...multimodal composing reinforces and further develops at least three essential characteristics of a critically literate person, " by:
1) understanding that a text is not a transparent window on reality, but is constructed;

2) developing and demonstrating rhetorical awareness both as a composer of text and as a reader of text; and

3) developing agency as a communicator and as a reader, rather than opting for the passivity that our popular media environment makes so easy.

...by interlacing writing and the visual, their students learn not just how visuals function in conveying a point of view, but how they can use those same techniques to create an argument that will catch the attention of peers largely used to observing but not thinking about images.

"[w]hether we are teaching visually adept students (or teaching students how to be visually adept) we need to understand the students' construction of reality and the way they approach learning."