Blogging as a Multiliteracy Approach to Teaching Visual Communication

By Monica Wesley

As the expectations placed upon technical communicators have grown, educators have also realized that there is a pressing need to teach technical communication students visual communication skills. Unfortunately, verbal and visual literacies are too often viewed as dichotomous—skills and abilities that are entirely distinct from one another. Instead of framing verbal and visual literacies as silos of knowledge and ability, this article proposes a multiliteracy approach to the teaching of visual communication. In such an approach, students who already possess verbal skills can use those abilities as a bridge to acquire visual communication skills. Here, I will discuss the ways in which students benefit when instructional blogging is used in a visual communication course.

The Expanding Role of the Technical Communicator

Recent technical communication research has made it clear that members of the discipline are adjusting their research focus to include visual communication. Students, in particular, now need to master an ability to move between different modes of communication, including both verbal (the use of words) and visual (the use of images and design). The growing relevance of visual communication coincides with advances in technology, which have enabled individuals to more easily create, share, modify, and disseminate visuals. As educators recognize the need for students to acquire multiple literacies in order to navigate the complexity of their twenty-first-century communicative role, the gulf between verbal and visual modes of communication is shrinking. As Eva Brumberger explained, technical communication texts—now more than ever—incorporate visual elements to a degree that requires the authors of these documents to possess both verbal and visual literacy.

A Multiliteracy Approach to Technical Communication

A well-known article by Kelli Cargile Cook has been instrumental in alerting technical communicators to the multiple literacies that technical communication students must master. Her framework included basic, rhetorical, social, technological, ethical, and critical literacy. However, this same framework omitted visual literacy as a distinct category, which she rationalized by arguing that visual literacy is as fundamental as basic literacy and thus is included in the other six categories. Other researchers have argued that visual literacy needs to be understood as a distinct literacy. Tiffany Craft Portewig suggested that visual literacy “is far too complex and unfamiliar to students to be assimilated into the other six literacies.” While there are many, sometimes conflicting, definitions of visual literacy, the work of other researchers lends support to the argument that visual literacy should be understood as a distinct skill. In particular, Maria Avgerinou identified twelve abilities that constitute visual literacy. These included “visual discrimination, visual association, constructing meaning, knowledge of visual vocabulary and definition, knowledge of visual conventions, visual reasoning, visual reconstruction, critical viewing, visualization, visual memory, visual thinking, and reconstructing meaning.” As these researchers have demonstrated, visual literacy represents a complex construct comprised of a variety of abilities related to visuals, visual communication, and visual thinking.

Blogging as a Multiliteracy Approach to Learning

The educational expectations of both technical communication instructors and students are being altered by new communication technologies. Both Jill Rettberg and Will Richardson have argued that blogging and other Web-based technologies have changed what it means to be literate. Researchers no longer consider literacy to be simply the ability to read and write, but instead a host of distinct competencies, including both visual and technological ability, among others. According to Richardson, this reassessment also means that educators must rethink their curricular decisions and the expectations that they place on students. As an advocate of instructional blogging, Richardson suggested that blogs provide a constructivist tool for learning; help students extend the relevance of their work; facilitate collaboration; archive student learning and assist with reflection and analysis; support different learning styles; help bring about topic-specific expertise through repeated writing; and, perhaps most importantly, teach new literacies. Because blogging offers the capability to incorporate images, audio, and video, instructors can use instructional blogging to help students acquire or enhance a variety of literacies. Therefore, students can use blogging to build on their existing strengths, such as their writing ability, as they strive to acquire visual communication skills. My experience suggests that instructional blogging fosters a social and communicative context in which students can explore and employ multiple literacies, such as rhetorical, visual, social, and technological.

The Blogging Assignment

I assigned students in my Graphics of Communication course a series of blog prompts, which were intended to help them articulate their emerging understanding of visual communication and design, as well as develop their visual literacy. For example, in one blog prompt students were asked to explain their understanding of visual communication and design, as well as its societal function. Other blog prompts required students to identify and share both successful and unsuccessful examples of visual communication, while also providing a rationale for their choices. For each blog prompt, I also required students to comment on at least two of their peers’ posts.

At the end of the semester, I invited students to complete a survey to assess what visual communication or design skills they may or may not have acquired, the value derived from blogging, the drawbacks and benefits of the blogging assignment, and their general satisfaction with blogging as part of the course. I also examined all students’ blog posts and peer comments looking for evidence of multiple literacies. Some literacies were readily apparent. Students necessarily demonstrated technological literacy as they navigated and manipulated blogging software. Other literacies, such as social, rhetorical, and visual literacy, could be inferred from students’ written texts.

What Was Gained from Blogging

When asked to reflect on their experience, my students articulated a number of benefits that accrued as a result of the use of instructional blogging. Students identified the following benefits: the opportunity to critically analyze and express their views on design (“understand the material by explaining the material”), the chance to view additional design examples beyond what was shown in class, the ability to learn about blogging, and the chance to learn from one’s classmates. Several students also mentioned that blogging provided a new and different way to participate in class.

As the course instructor, I found blogging to be beneficial because it allowed me to gauge the extent to which students understood course content. Because students blogged fairly frequently, I was able to quickly address any knowledge gaps by providing additional in-class instruction. Additionally, students were able to complete their blog posts and comments at their convenience. The asynchronous nature of blogging provided additional flexibility. Throughout the blogging assignment, I was pleased to see that students were able to relate course concepts to previous courses. Oftentimes, students bolstered their blog posts by including lessons they had learned in previous classes. Similarly, students were able to conceptualize how blogging, and the ability to do so, might contribute to their future professional success, and how their newfound visual literacy could be applied to future classes. Furthermore, students provided evidence of their changing attitudes, which resulted from the course. Finally, students’ blog posts demonstrated that they were successful in building a respectful, supportive peer environment.

By examining the students’ blog posts, I was able to comprehend the extent to which their blogging contributed to their acquisition of various literacies, including visual literacy. In addition to visual literacy, students deployed a number of other literacies, including basic, rhetorical, social, and technological. Students readily demonstrated basic and technological literacy, since these literacies were embedded in the blogging activity itself. Basic literacy, or the ability to use words to read and write, was evident in the writing activity. Students also demonstrated their technological literacy in the use of blogging software. Students exhibited an awareness of the ways that new technologies are changing the nature of communication. Overall, they seemed keenly aware of the impact that these technologies have on their ability to interface with the world around them. Their ability to articulate this shift represented a clear demonstration of their technological literacy.

By commenting on their peers’ blog posts, students experienced greater peer interaction and, thereby, exhibited and developed their social literacy skills. Their blog posts revealed a number of instances of social literacy, including the acts of affirmation, engagement, reflection, and constructive criticism. Students often began their blog comments with an act of affirmation or agreement with their peer. Sometimes students did not move beyond this affirmation. They also supported their peers through compliments. While some might dismiss these types of comments, students’ affirmation of one another created a learning environment where students felt secure enough to express their emergent visual literacy. Therefore, students capitalized on the social nature of blogging and peer interaction and demonstrated the ability to collaborate with one another when discussing, evaluating, and critiquing course content. Other students’ posts moved beyond simple agreement and instead reflected on or critiqued the original blog post and its claims. Students used instructional blogging to grow their social literacy skills, while helping to create an inclusive forum in which to do so.

Throughout the blogging assignment, students also demonstrated rhetorical literacy. Rhetorical literacy includes the ability to define and identify target audiences, craft a message in response to a target audience, and understand the ways that design choices have rhetorical effects. Rhetorical literacy represents a critical skill in not only visual communication, but in most communication-related disciplines, including technical communication. Students were able to apply course content to better understand target audiences, while also articulating the rhetorical significance of this ability. Overall, students exhibited a sensitivity to target audiences and understood the ways that successful visual communication and design should consider the rhetorical implications of targeted messages.

Visual literacy was the most prevalent literacy exhibited in students’ blog posts. In some respects, this is attributable to the instructor-initiated blog prompts, which involved the topic of visual communication and design. However, one should not dismiss the fact that students were able to demonstrate several abilities indicative of visual literacy. Students were not only able to intelligently apply course concepts, but also correctly use visual vocabulary (e.g., vectors, white space, information hierarchy, and grids) in their discussion and evaluation of design examples. Students also demonstrated the ability to evaluate and critique each other’s design solutions. Students were able to not only evaluate a design, but also actively offer suggestions for improvement. Finally, students articulated an understanding of the overall importance of visual communication and design.

I will briefly return to Avgerinou’s twelve visual literacy abilities to further explain how the blogging assignment demonstrated students’ acquisition of visual literacy. Students were able to apply course concepts, intelligently use visual vocabulary in their analyses of design examples, and also discuss how these visual concepts contributed to a design’s success or failure. Students also proved adept at evaluating, interpreting, critiquing, and even making suggestions for improving other’s designs. These skills are comparable to Avgerinou’s concepts of critical viewing, visual discrimination, constructing meaning, and visual association. Students also demonstrated their knowledge of visual communication through their ability to discuss design principles and conventions. In describing design decisions, such as target audiences and information hierarchies, students exhibited an ability to think visually and visualize. These skills meet Portewig’s criteria for visual literacy, including the ability to think visually, analyze, and communicate, as well as create visuals and understand their rhetorical function and context. Therefore, the activity of blogging capitalized on students’ basic literacy skills of reading and writing as they worked to acquire and develop visual literacy skills.

Conclusion

Overall results suggested that there are numerous benefits to using blogging assignments in a visual communication classroom—enough benefits that educators should be encouraged to incorporate blogging into the classroom when appropriate. The frequency with which students identified benefits that were directly related to visual communication and design skills—such as analyzing and critiquing designs, as well as rationalizing one’s own design choices—suggested students’ visual literacy was supported by the blogging assignments. Furthermore, students’ blog posts provided evidence of other literacies, such as basic, technological, social, and rhetorical. Students’ posts demonstrated not only their ability to exercise these literacies, but also their ability to articulate their awareness of these literacies. Thus, blogging, in this instance, provided a means for students to take a multiliteracy approach to visual communication.

It is my hope that other educators will consider experimenting with blogging as an instructional method. My experience indicates that there is value to be had, and that blogging can support, enhance, and reinforce course content and that students respond well to the activity itself. Because today’s Web-enhanced environment has changed what it means to be literate, instructional blogging can help technical communication educators and students navigate the communicative complexities of this changing environment.