Seeing what we mean: visual knowledge and critical epistemology

Abstract

As knowledge production, interpretation, and representation in educational settings rolls along Guttenberg’s (text‐based) track, the twenty‐first‐century world outside the doors of the schools and universities is exploding with visual ways of knowing and being. As visual text is silenced in education, it is simultaneously exploited in the marketplace. This article will examine some of the political, epistemological, and ontological questions that are raised by education’s steadfast adherence to the reductionism of ‘text only’ in a richly multimodal/visual world. The author uses a short autoethnographic journey as a starting point to examine the connections between critical pedagogy and visual knowledge in the quest for an educational world that literally and figuratively sees more.

Keywords:

• visual knowledge
• critical pedagogy
• representation
• schools
• advertising
• adolescence
• cultural studies
• history of childhood

Notes

1. By ‘school’ here, I refer to high school. Some schools for young children are admittedly much more ocular‐centric.

2. Figures are deliberately untitled.

3. Life is Elsewhere was the title of his popular 1976 book.

4. As I present my readings of images in schools, I do not suppose my answers or my questions to be definitive; my hope is to broadly problematize the issue. The way that images are read by different populations can, of course, vary widely. However, I believe that it is important to examine the possible readings and the intent of images circulating in schools.

5. That number (234) is dated, to the 1990s. It is reasonable to assume that currently it is higher.

6. Ironically and not surprisingly, I am unable to reproduce the images from these web pages because of copyright restrictions.

7. It is worth noting that some classes and school curriculum (in particular English Literature classes) make attempts to incorporate visual knowledge into curriculum and instruction; however, most high school instruction dismisses images.

8. I acknowledge that it is far beyond the scope of this paper to engage in a comprehensive overview of all images in classroom materials, and such an undertaking would hardly be possible.