Abstract
Poor visual literacy and critical thinking skills are obstacles for visual art students for
whom the ability to engage meaningfully with visual content is a core skill. These
future artists’ capability to engage with the visual with attentive, considered interest
and understanding will either propel them toward or hold them back from achieving
the potential every one of them holds. Together with visual literacy, critical thinking is
vital for students to read visual content and understand what they are seeing, in order
to make informed decisions about what this content means, or what messages it
contains. Advances in technology and new visual media have resulted in images
becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary culture, making visual literacy and
the ability to critically read or make sense of the visual essential for all individuals to
participate in a highly visual culture that permeates all aspects of contemporary life.
This research addresses the problem of visual art students’ poor visual literacy and
critical thinking skills, through developing a learning unit and research informed
teaching materials that can become part of the first year Art Theory curriculum.
The dissertation presents a case study in which a cohort of first year students are
taught a visual literacy learning unit, that includes the use of purposely developed,
research informed, multimodal teaching materials. The design of the materials
encourages thinking with and through art and incorporates exercises that helped make
thinking visible for the students. The pedagogical approach to the learning unit was
informed by a social constructivist teaching method, that call for experiential activities,
that were situated and engaged multiple senses; including engaging with multimodal
texts, tactile explorations of the materiality of objects, and using reflective writing. A
critical reflection of the student responses to the learning unit, using a SOLO
taxonomy, found that adopting a multimodal, enquiry based approach to teaching and
learning, underpinned by social constructionist and multimodal pedagogies,
encouraged active participation, sophisticated understanding, sustained interest and
engagement, and increased confidence in the participants, which all contribute to
better skills development.