Students’ Right to Their Own Visual Language

Erik Hayenga, Michigan Technological University
Dennis A. Lynch, Michigan Technological University

The recent strong, national trend toward teaching visual communication together with composition—in various ways—raises many pressing questions (as can be seen in the descriptions of several of the CCCC funded research projects addressing the visual and (more generally) multiliteracies). Are these efforts at multimodal instruction stretching our courses and curricula too thin? Which theoretical orientations best guide the design and delivery of such courses and curricula? What new roles does technology play in these new pedagogical efforts? And how might we ensure we take on the teaching of visual/multimodal communication in the most responsible manner?

As the title of our project indicates, we chose to begin with a question of policy: does the CCCC organization need to consider adopting a resolution proclaiming students’ rights to their own patterns and varieties of visual communication, modeled after the 1974 resolution on “students’ rights to their own patterns and varieties of language”? This is not a rhetorical question, for us. We do not know if such a policy is advisable at this time; indeed, we do not even know if such a policy can be formulated in a coherent manner. We do know though that the question of what students bring to classroom by way of experience with visual communication is a useful place to begin, ethically and pedagogically.

The first issue—the first step in our project—is to determine what skills, knowledge and experience with visual communication students do in fact bring to the classroom. In order to start to find this out, we have developed and piloted some class exercises and questionnaires geared to reveal how students approach visual communication and to help us detect possible “patterns and varieties” in student knowledge—possible differences among various visual literacies (if such exist).

This step has its potential pitfalls, however. Anne Frances Wysocki, for instance, argues in several places that speaking of “visual literacy” may be misguided and misleading, since it is not at all clear that the skills and knowledge necessary to produce effective visual communications constitute anything like a “literacy.” In the context of our guiding question, we should note that the policy on students’ rights to their own language emerged in the struggles over “Standard Written English” and the aims of teaching writing in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s. Oral and written communication historically have been sites of standardization and normalization, but it is not clear (indeed it seems not to be the case) that visual communication exists as such a site, just as it is not clear that there exist anything like visual “dialects” or “culturally determined patterns and varieties.” Do we see around us movements to enforce Standard Visual Communication on a par with movements to enforce Standard Written/Spoken English? If not, then the impetus to explore the need for a resolution on students’ rights to their own, culturally determined ways of communicating visually may loose some of its force and sense.

The second step in our project, then, might be to finesse the policy question, answering tentatively “yes and no.” It may be that visual communication is not similar enough to oral and written language to make sense of/warrant a resolution on students’ rights to their own preexisting ways of communicating visually, but it may be that something else requires protection: students’ rights to a robust, critical visual education that allows them to develop their own, nonstandard ways of designing. The closest thing we have, visually speaking, to something like Standard Written English are design principles, presented uncritically, such as are found in best-selling texts like Robin Williams’ The Nondesigners Design Book. We at Michigan Tech use this book (and we would like to find out how widespread its use is), and our collective experience leads us to the following concern: can the uncritical use of such textbooks—borrowed from design or art—effectively cut students off from developing potentially rich visual communication skills, and do we need, if not a policy, then some other concerted efforts to resist standardized visual communication curricula?

The problem of developing new courses and curricula around the juncture of visual and written communication, then, clearly leads us into questions of responsibility to our students. We hope that by beginning with the policy question of students’ rights to their own language and ways of communicating visually eventually to clarify what our responsibilities are or may be.

To this end, we might use the cohorts to help us determine—based on their research into multimodal instruction (“multiliteracies”)—if our suspicions regarding visual communication fit with what they know about it. Does it make sense to presume that students bring to the classroom anything like culturally distinct ways of visually communicating that might be threatened by a form of Standard Visual Communication? The cohorts might also help us think through the question of production—do students entering college have enough production experience in the area of visual communication to warrant concerns about how we make use of, or not, such prior experience? How might we best determine what prior experience students have in this regard? How have other schools implementing curricula that include visual communication determined who their students are, visually speaking?