Teaching with ImagesVADS Seminar, 1st December 2009

Pauline Ridley, University of Brighton

Centre for Learning & Teaching

LearnHigher Visual Practices Co-ordinator

Image sources (via Google): Above: New York Historical Society/ Magic Lantern Slide Lecture, illustration from1897 McAllister Co catalogue (from http://witcombe.sbc.edu/arth-technology/)Bottom: Duke University CIT

Visual Practices?

• LearnHigher is one of 74 national Centres of Excellence in Teaching & Learning (CETLs). A partnership of 16 universities, a cross-section of the sector, supporting student learning development http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/

• Within LearnHigher, Brighton leads the Visual Practices learning area, which aims:– to improve understanding of the visual knowledge

and skills required in different disciplines and how these are taught and assessed

– to develop resources for students and staff http://staffcentral.brighton.ac.uk/learnhigher(or access through the main LearnHigher site)

Brighton & Sussex Medical School ‘Learning to Look’, a photography course for medical students to improve observation skills, visual diagnostics and reflection on their own learning

Visual Practices projects at Brighton

Many more projects in geology, media, nursing, education, cultural studies, arts and architecture, design history, languages, social sciences....and the Big Draw@ Brighton – a university-wide programme of events to raise awareness of drawing as a tool for HE learning and research.

Tourism Students carrying out a piece of fieldwork to construct a visual narrative, using still images or video, in relation to Eastbourne as a seaside town and holiday destination.

Teaching art & design history• Background • Available technology 15th-20th centuries:

21st century developments…

I told people when I first arrived here [2005] I'm not going to show a slide at Yale University. Come hell or high water, no matter what happens, I'm not going to show a slide at Yale University! So, I've completely made the switch. And the reason is that students learn much better. That is the most important reason. …… Since it is easy to repeat images and to change images quickly, I tend to show comparisons followed by single details. I now show more pictures or rather more details of the same number of basic images.Robert Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor of History of Art, Yale University (interviewed in 2006)

• But is it true that students learn much better using the new technologies ?• And have the underlying educational issues really changed?

Online learning: content-based learning packages or student-generated content?

Discussion• What do teachers need

– i) when looking for images to use in our teaching?– ii) when using images in our teaching?

• How do we balance our own desire for maximum choice with the need to help students to learn to look attentively at fewer images for longer?

• How can we make the most of the new technologies available to help students learn independently from and through images – but without losing touch completely with embodied sensory learning?

• Should digital image archives concentrate on makingtheir collections as comprehensive and searchable as possible or on developing tools to help educators and students use what is already there more effectively?