Designing Texts

Teaching Visual Communication

Eva Brumberger, Kathryn Northcut, Eva R. Brumberger, Kathryn M. Northcut

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351868136
• Print ISBN:
  9780895037855
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology

'Designing Texts' is an edited collection dedicated to teaching visual communication in non-visual disciplines, with a particular focus on the fields of technical and professional communication, rhetoric, and composition.

Part 1
Visual Thinking and Problem Solving

Introduction

There have been long-standing tensions between science and art, word and image. For decades, people interested in science or art have perceived (and perhaps created) tension between the two worlds, a tension they sometimes liken to the privileging of verbal texts over visual representations. Western cultural stereotypes have distinguished the scientist from the artist, with the scientist a rational, responsible problem solver and the artist a creative, but not very reliable, free spirit. Similarly, what Coyne and Snodgrass (1991) term the "dual knowledge thesis" has positioned verbal thinking as rational and analytical, with visual thinking its antithesis, intuitive and unsystematic. This is a division that has been traced at least as far back as classical Greece (Arnheim, 1969).

Contemporary scientists may be less likely to perceive such distinctions, given the expectation of well-integrated visual and verbal constructs in virtually all published scientific reports. Artists may consider themselves to be scientific in many respects, as well—especially if they are illustrators who develop realistic or representational images. And several scholars have now posited models in which there are multiple modes of thought, none of which is inherently superior. Students who can switch modes as needed—to be both scientist and artist, both wordsmith and designer—are likely to thrive in the communication environment of the 21st century.

Thus, we begin the collection with chapters that rely on theory and research to bring together science and art, verbal and visual. The authors bring theory from other disciplines into technical communication and writing. They emphasize the thinking and problem-solving processes inherent in both verbal and visual communication. They offer research that helps to further dispel the notion of visual communication as mysteriously intuitive. And, as importantly, they provide concrete suggestions for putting the theory and research into pedagogical practice.

Theory-driven pedagogy helps us, as instructors, articulate strong answers to questions about what we do in our classrooms and why, even as the documents under consideration change from paper-based forms to animated electronic simulations. The praxis of those who teach visual communication should include understanding relevant theories and research; helping students understand how those realms of knowledge can and should impact the work of practitioners; and sharing our successes in making theory and research relevant. Such praxis ensures flexibility for our methods to take us into the future, to adapt to changing genres and contexts of use, and to meet the needs of audiences whose experiences and expectations will be far different from those of the 20th-century.

In the first chapter in the section, Lisa Meloncon draws on geography to develop a framework for better integrating visual communication into technical communication courses, one of the difficulties faced particularly by those who teach so-called "service" courses (those delivered as a service to other departments and programs). She describes how she teaches students to "read the landscape" in various visual communication settings (from classroom to document) through cultivating a habit of attention. One of the challenges in teaching visual communication is students' tendency to overlook, take for granted, or neglect to consider details that are vital to effective design. The habits of attention that Meloncon discusses, therefore, hold promise to improve teaching as well as to strengthen the documents designed by students. As significantly, her pedagogical framework can be applied in a variety of classroom environments.

In a similar vein, Teena Carnegie frames the work of visual communication as problem solving, and argues that effective problem solving depends on seeing the relationships among the various elements in a given situation. She articulates specific connections between principles of visual design and theories of problem solving, and reminds readers that a more complex understanding of problem solving enables students to address nonroutine as well as routine visual communication problems.

Linda Driskill's discussion of visual argument provides a way to focus students' attention deeply on the workings of visual texts as they act in contexts and interact with readers/users. As Arnheim (1969) argued, "Every visual pattern—be it that of a painting, a building, an ornament, a chair—can be considered a proposition which, more or less successfully, makes a declaration about the nature of human existence" (p. 296). Driskill offers readers an understanding of the basic elements of argumentation theory that they can take directly into the visual communication classroom. If students understand persuasion as a complex constellation of tools, strategies, and effects on audiences, then they are less likely to either over- or underestimate the power of the visuals they employ in their designs. In some courses, we devote the entire semester to argumentation theory; in many more courses, at least some portion of the course is devoted to it. The chapter should help all of us better understand our options for teaching visual argument.

Finally, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning focus on an aspect of visual communication that we sometimes tend to take for granted: color. Amare and Manning dispel some common assumptions about the "meanings" of various colors; they offer instead empirical confirmation that colors can have consistent emotional meanings across a variety of contexts and cultures. The model Amare and Manning propose enables our teaching to transcend idiosyncratic evaluations ("I like pink") and avoid cultural stereotyping ("In Egypt, red means death"), focusing instead on criteria-based feedback ("the gentle lines and light blue color convey tranquility, which makes these suitable choices for a rehabilitation center brochure") that can help students' decisions about color to be more effective. The chapter also offers readers suggestions for specific classroom activities.

Taken together, the chapters in this first section may help us move toward more informed practice as teachers and designers. Instructors are likely to find that focusing on one or more of the approaches discussed by the authors (landscape, argument, problem solving), and incorporating research findings like those presented in the chapter on color, will help students perceive visual communication as cohesive and meaningful instead of idiosyncratic and decorative. Over 40 years ago, Arnheim (1969) argued that "What is most needed is not more aesthetics or more esoteric manuals of art education but a convincing case made for visual thinking quite in general (p. 3). We hope that these chapters encourage and enable instructors to emphasize visual thinking in their teaching. Using the approaches described by the authors, we can more effectively develop the scientist and the artist in every student, enabling them to be more literate consumers and producers of all texts.

References

Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Coyne, R., & Snodgrass, A. (1991). Is designing mysterious? Challenging the dual knowledge thesis. Design Studies, 12, 124-131.

Chapter 1
How to Read Landscapes: A Method for Integrating Visual Communication in the Technical Communication Classroom

Lisa Meloncon

Scholars have begun to publish more sustained inquiries into the relationship between the visual and the verbal (Allen, 2002; Brasseur, 2003; Handa, 2004; Hill & Helmers, 2004; Hocks & Kendrick, 2003; Kostlenick & Hassett, 2003) that have helped to establish a theoretical groundwork for analysis of visual texts. In addition, technical communication teachers also have a series of texts available to theoretically ground the teaching of visual communication and document design (Kimball & Hawkins, 2008; Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011; Schriver, 1997). But, what is missing are best practices and specific pedagogical strategies to integrate visual communication into the classroom. In acknowledging these difficulties, Brumberger (2005) believes a way to solve the crucial need of "reconciling pedagogy to practice" would be to "integrate visual communication into the heart of existing courses" (p. 324). I take this emphasis on integration as my starting point. Rather than making discussions of design separate, I argue for an integrated approach drawn in large part from one of the first "seeing" disciplines: geography. If geography instructors can teach students to "read landscapes" to make better planning decisions and to understand the world, then technical communication instructors may be able to appropriate comparable techniques to teach visual communication. By emphasizing the idea of integration, the pedagogical approach I put forth can be adapted to a variety of situations, teaching styles, and audiences and is transportable, adaptable, and flexible enough to be used in a variety of classroom and workplace settings.

Here I focus on the practical application of theory that can be integrated into a course many of us teach: the technical communication service course. I use service course here to mean an introductory course for nonmajors delivered primarily as a service to other departments and programs on campus. Such courses are a large, and growing, segment of the work that technical communication instructors do. Service courses are designed to better prepare students for the writing they will do on the job, and they are often a nonmajors' only interaction with technical communication and designing texts.

I provide a brief overview of the way geographers talk about and use landscape theory and describe its usefulness in extending pedagogical practices for teaching visual communication. Next, using concepts gleaned from geographer Peirce Lewis' work, I describe a 2-part pedagogical framework with accompanying exercises that can be used to integrate visual communication into the technical communication classroom.

Why Landscapes?

Geography derives from the Greek words meaning "Earth" and "to describe or to write," which, together, suggest that geographers "write" the Earth; as a science, it is the description and study of the Earth's surface. Geographers Gregory (1994) and Livingstone (1993) have both shown that geography considers itself a visual discipline. One must see the Earth to write about it. Historically, geography has three branches: (a) physical, which examines the physical aspects of the world around us; (b) human, which studies the impacts of people on the physical world; and (c) regional, which analyzes the political and economic issues associated with the other two branches. All three branches interrelate to provide a comprehensive picture of the world, and one idea that unites all three branches is the concept of landscape.

As an "intensely visual idea" (Cresswell, 2004, p. 10), landscapes provide geographers one way of seeing the Earth while being outside of the actual scene. "Landscape first emerged as a term, an idea, or better still, a way of seeing the external world in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries" (Cosgrove, 1985, p. 46). Landscape has continued to be useful to geographers because of the many interpretations of the term itself, and they "represent an attempt to define the elusive object of geographical study in an integrated yet more focused way" (Matthews & Herbert, 2004, p. 217). In everyday language, one hears of all kinds of landscapes, such as a landscape painting, landscaping the yard, the political landscape; landscape is even an orientation of the page in printing. Landscapes are useful to teaching visual communication in the writing classroom because they provide a point of reference, a way of seeing a specific context for the writing situation.

For the purposes of this discussion, I consider landscapes to be "socially constructed representations, mediated through culture, and interpreted by the individual or predefined group" (Meloncon, 2007, p. 37). In this way, landscapes can give students another way of understanding the murky and often abstract concept of context. So the classroom becomes a landscape. The memory of a special vacation becomes a landscape. The site of a proposed new park can become a contested landscape. The organization a student will work for after graduation is a landscape embedded with ideological and power structures of that organization. In short, landscapes are cultural manifestations in the sense that they are embedded with politics, power, norms, customs, and constraints.

Landscapes pull "everything together—physical, chemical, biological, human—into a framework that can be analyzed and, therefore, interpreted" (Meloncon, 2007, p. 36). If they can be interpreted, then they can be read. Lewis (1979) writes, "to 'read landscape,' to make sense of the ordinary things that constitute the workaday world of things we see, most of us need help" (p. 14). Lewis' emphasis on the ordinary landscape relates directly to technical communication, in that the day-to-day, ephemeral writing that goes on in organizations is ordinary.

The focus on the everyday likewise connects to teaching visual th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Meeting the Challenge of Teaching Visual Communication
• PART 1 Visual Thinking and Problem Solving
• PART 2 Contexts for Teaching and Learning
• PART 3 Evaluation and Assessment
• PART 4 Tools and Technologies
• PART 5 Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix
• Contributors
• Index