Visual Pedagogies: Concepts, Cases and Practices takes readers on a journey through practico-theoretical experiments in thought, research and practice. Across disciplines, these authors navigate visuality to enhance pedagogical sensibility to how we observe, analyze, criticize and reflect on through visual processes.

Literacy practices have changed over the past several years to incorporate modes of representation much broader than language alone, in which the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, etc. This book focuses on research and instructional practices necessary for integrating an expanded view of literacy in the classroom that offers multiple points of entry for all students. Projects highlighted in this book incorporate multiple modes of communication (e.g., visual, aural, textual) through various digital and print-based written formats. In addition, this book particularly focuses on the possibilities that this expanded view of literacy holds for emergent to advanced bilingual students and specific scaffolds necessary for supporting them. Our focus is specifically multilingual students as classrooms across the United States and other English-speaking countries around the world become more and more diverse. The book considers educators as active participants in social change and contributors to our overall goal of social justice for all. This book grew out of work conducted by doctoral students and former doctoral students, now faculty at various universities, from the Language and Literacy Learning in Multilingual Settings (LLLMS) specialization in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, Florida. The most outstanding feature of this work is the breadth of examples for integrating literacy in the classroom, as well as the specific instructional strategies provided for supporting multilingual students. This volume is unique in tackling both literacy and specific scaffolding for multilingual students. Additionally, the chapters here collectively aim to go beyond describing research to also provide a variety of classroom connections for practitioners and implications for teacher education.

The Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood focuses specifically on the most cutting-edge, innovative and international approaches in the study of children’s use of and learning with digital technologies. This edited volume is a comprehensive survey of methods in children’s technologies and contains a rich repertoire of studies from diverse fields and research, including both educational and developmental psychology, post-humanist literacy, applied linguistics, language and phenomenology and narrative approaches. For ease of reference, the Handbook's 28 chapters are divided into four thematic sections: introduction and opening reflections; studies answering ontological questions, which theorize how children take on original identities in becoming literate with technologies; studies answering epistemological questions, which focus on how children’s knowledge and learning are (co)constructed with a diverse range of technologies; studies answering practice-related questions, which explore the resources and conditions that create the most powerful learning opportunities for children. Expertly edited, this interdisciplinary and international compendium is an ideal introduction to such a diverse, multi-faceted field.

A student’s learning experience can be enhanced through a multitude of pedagogical strategies. This can be accomplished by visually engaging students in classroom activities. Visual Imagery, Metadata, and Multimodal Literacies Across the Curriculum is a pivotal reference source that examines the role of visual-based stimuli to create meaningful learning in contemporary classroom settings. Highlighting a range of relevant topics such as writing composition, data visualization, and literature studies, this book is ideally designed for educators, researchers, professionals, and academics interested in the application of visual imagery in learning environments.

Our image-rich, media-dominated culture prompts critical thinking about how we educate young children. In response, this volume provides a rich and provocative synthesis of theory, research, and practice that pushes beyond monomodal constructs of teaching and learning. It is a book about bringing “sense” to 21st century early childhood education, with “sense” as related to modalities (sight, hearing), and “sense” in terms of making meaning. It reveals how multimodal perspectives emphasize the creative, transformative process of learning by broadening the modes for understanding and by encouraging critical analysis, problem solving, and decision-making. The volume’s explicit focus on children’s visual texts (“art”) facilitates understanding of multimodal approaches to language, literacy, and learning. Authentic examples feature diverse contexts, including classrooms, homes, museums, and intergenerational spaces, and illustrate children’s “sense-making” of life experiences such as birth, identity, environmental phenomena, immigration, social justice, and homelessness. This timely book provokes readers to examine understandings of language, literacy, and learning through a multimodal lens; provides a starting point for constructing broader, multimodal views of what it might mean to “make meaning;” and underscores the production and interpretation of visual texts as meaning making processes that are especially critical to early childhood education in the 21st century.

In contemporary Western societies, the visual domain has come to assume a hitherto unprecedented cultural centrality. Daily life is replete with a potentially endless stream of images and other visual messages: from the electronic and paper-based billboards of the street, to the TV and Internet feeds of the home. The visual has become imbued with a symbolic potency, a signifying power that seemingly eclipses that of all other sensory data. The central aim of this four-volume collection is to explore key approaches to visual research methods and to consider some of the core principles, issues, debates and controversies surrounding the use of visual techniques in relation to three key enterprises: 1) documentation and representation; 2) interpretation and classification and 3) elicitation and collaboration. Volume One: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research serves as a theoretical backdrop to the field as a whole. It introduces core epistemological, ethical and methodological debates that effectively cut across the four volume collection as a whole. Volume Two: Documentation and Representation illustrates approaches to visual documentation and representation, from classical documentaries to contemporary, state of the art modes of visual anthropology and ethnography. Volume Three: Interpretation and Classification examines core debates surrounding and approaches to visual analysis. Volume Four: Elicitation and Collaboration explores participative approaches to visual inquiry.

New literacies, globally popular among children and adolescents in and out of school contexts, are challenging educators and institutions to rethink pedagogies. As educators begin to embrace the pedagogical possibilities of multimodal texts and digital practices, they are exploring the complexities of assessing these new literacies. The essays in this book explore what it means to assess the sophisticated textual engagements of new literacies, including reading and writing online, social networking, gaming, multimodal composing, and creating virtual identities. Chapters offer practical examples of new literacies, and examine how assessment provides insight into the diverse ways in which language is conceived, valued, and used to inform the literate lives of its twenty-first century users. Scholars and educators will find this collection full of rich understanding of the assessment concerns raised by new communication practices, youth culture, digital engagements, and semiotic diversification.

This cutting-edge approach to information literacy will help your students grasp an understanding of the critical thinking and reflection required to engage in technology spaces as savvy producers, collaborators, and sharers.