Faculty from across the campus had an opportunity in June to participate in a series of week-long institutes on the value and challenges of incorporating visual materials in the classroom in a way that supports inclusive teaching. The institutes, sponsored by the Curriculum Transformation Project, focused respectively on “the basics,” on “moving images,” and on “mappings, place, and space.” Each institute offered sessions on analyzing visual imagery and on creating it, especially though not exclusively through current technologies ranging from power point and wikis to GIS satellite imaging. Participating faculty are committed to developing at least one classroom resource drawing on their institute participation.

Pedagogical strategies introduced to the group included methods for teaching students really to see images by focusing on details as well as on the whole; comparing and contrasting representations of gender in popular film by juxtaposing short clips; acknowledging and using imagery from youth culture, like anime and graphic novels; and using various kinds of visual mappings to show conceptual as well as geographic relationships. A number of sessions in the first weeks drew on resources available to the campus via ARHU’s Visual Literacy Toolbox, a repository of ideas and materials for teaching (http://www.arhu.umd.edu/vislit/). Third week participants were able to visit a special exhibit at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore that illuminated the role of place and space in the art of the renowned quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Directed by Elsa Barkley Brown, Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies, Catherine Hays,

Associate Director of Academic Technology in the College of Arts and Humanities (both developers of the Visual Literacy Toolbox), and Deborah Rosenfelt, Professor of Women’s Studies and Director of the Curriculum Transformation Project, the institutes also drew on the expertise of a range of consultants.

Kimberlee Staking, an advanced graduate student in Women’s Studies, illustrated the use of online rollovers to analyze the quilt art of Faith Ringgold; Reggie Harrison, Professor of Comparative Literature, demonstrated how a frame-by-frame analysis of a Ford ad uncovered a narrative laden with cultural references and cross-cultural tensions, as well as presenting her own film, Mined to Death. Madeline Zilfi, Associate Professor of History, illustrated how she uses You Tube in classes as a resource and discussion stimulus. Kelly Quinn, Assistant Professor at Miami University in Ohio and a recent Ph.D. in American Studies from UM, offered both technological help with FLICKR, Google Earth, and other mapping programs, and discussed her own research on place and space in urban housing projects. WMST graduate student Rachel Caidor both staffed the institute and assisted faculty with such projects as importing film clips for editing.

University of Maryland staff who generously shared their time and expertise with the group included Carleton Jackson, on the resources of non-print media; Jeff Maurer, on travelling with technology, Anne Bowden and Amy Ginther on copyright issues, Brad Paley, on Mind Mapping, and Kim Ricker on using GIS technology for information processing and modeling.

Participating faculty presented their own work-in-progress each Friday, drawing on institute resources to design impressive materials and assignments appropriate to their own courses. The presentations also generated discussion about a range of compelling issues: how would an instructor integrate music into power point presentations representing nineteenth-century slave rebellions without resorting to stereotyping? When and how does an instructor express his or her own views about images that seem homophobic, racist, or sexist? How does an instructor introduce and teach about disconcerting or deliberately provocative visual representations of gender, race, or sexuality, in, for example, performance art and contemporary visual art? What do footprints in cyberspace tell students working in teams about the characteristics–racial, ethnic, gender–of those drawn to particular sites on the web, and how legitimate is it to talk about “prejudice” in this context?

For more information about the institutes, contact Deborah Rosenfelt, Director, Curriculum Transformation Project.