Reading the world – teaching visual analysis in higher education

Abstract

This article provides a practical guide for teaching visual analysis to university students. By adapting Serafini’s curricular and pedagogical framework for teaching multimodal representations to incorporate self-reflection, I evince how visual analysis can be taught in a writing course and similar introductory courses. Using a photograph that juxtaposed Edvard Munch’s iconic image of The Scream, I aim to develop students’ visual literacy (VL) skills in terms of generating interpretations and translating the visual-to-verbal for meaning-making. Given the increasing dominance of visual representations, VL is fundamental to meet contemporary needs and thus, should not be marginalized in higher education.

Keywords:

• Visual literacy
• visual analysis
• visual pedagogy
• higher education
• interpretation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.