XVII Fulbright International Summer School in the Humanities
30 June – 4 July 2014
Visualizing Knowledge: Visual Literacy in Higher Education Today
Increasingly information comes to us in images, and this raises ever new questions about the importance of visualization for the transference of knowledge and for learning and teaching in higher education. Professionals in all fields today must possess the ability to process, interpret, and analyze images; both learners and teachers today need to be able to use images as instruments of thought and as building blocks of culture. Along with other “literacies,” higher education must provide students with multimedia literacy, the ability to integrate traditional forms for acquiring and transmitting knowledge (verbal, “literal”, printed) with other media (audio-visual, digital).
Around the world, academic institutions are responding vigorously to this need, creating interdisciplinary programs in media studies as well as developing visual studies within the traditional disciplines in order to facilitate students’ fluency in the languages of photography, cinema, television, and the Internet. The urgency with which these initiatives are evolving is not coincidental: visual literacy in the broadest sense of the term––the ability to “read,” to understand, to discuss, to create, to evaluate, and to employ complex image-based messages––has become a basic component of cultural competency. Depending on the breadth and effectiveness with which humanistic as well as scientific education equips students for visually based knowledge, the omnipresent culture of indiscriminately used images will become either a new “opium of the people” or a powerful resource for developing creative and critical intellect.
The XVII Fulbright Summer School will bring together Russian and international specialists in both theoretical and practical visual studies from multiple academic fields and pedagogical traditions to share their experience as well as to provide an introduction to issues raised by visualization and multiple approaches to address them in higher education. Topics of discussion will include: defining visual literacy; methods for developing visual literacy within existing disciplinary contexts; techniques for incorporating visuality in scholarship; planning and constructing programs in visual studies at various levels, and the adaptation of international experience to the specificities of Russian higher education.
Summer School sessions will be predominantly interactive and group discussions, supplemented by presentations. Working languages will be English and Russian.
The Summer School curriculum focuses broadly on the humanities and social sciences. Interested colleagues in all disciplines are encouraged to apply.
For further information please contact Ekaterina Kalinina at discours@philol.msu.ru (subject – Summer school).