Visual literacy and art history: Teaching images and objects in digital environments

Abstract

Though the image is central to the discipline, art history has not contributed extensively to the definition and practice of visual literacy studies. This chapter identifies an intersection between the two fields by examining the role of digital reproduction in the study of art history, particularly the ways in which reproductions of art objects and architecture in online digital environments provide an egalitarian space for students and teachers to hold discussion beyond the classroom. First, this chapter provides a brief examination of art history’s pedagogical practices as they relate to visual literacy studies. Then, four activities and assignments are presented which highlight the digitized object as a pedagogical tool. Students demonstrate visual and media literacy in assignments that make use of familiar apps like Instagram to perform traditional art historical methods of evaluating images, such as visual analysis and iconography, on the digitally reproduced image. Instructors guide students through web sites that host digitized objects, meeting their students, for example, in a medieval cathedral and discussing the articulation of the digital space. Through these activities, art history instructors capitalize on students’ technological abilities as digital natives while providing them with perspective on image-based technologies of previous eras. Although the focus is on students in a traditional higher education environment, many of the exercises presented can be modified for a younger learner base or the nontraditional higher education student.