This book introduces the concept of Inquiry Graphics, which positions graphics as significant and integrated tools of inquiry in higher education teaching and research. Simply put, the book explores the nuances of thinking and learning with digital images as types of graphics. Although the amount of images in modern life is overwhelming, they have been scarcely explored and understood as integral to concept and knowledge development within higher education practice. This book reflects on why and how digital photographs can be adapted and used in teaching and research contexts. It provides practical examples and applications, as well as theoretical foundations, building on a range of perspectives, such as Peircean triadic sign and approaches to conceptual development. Ultimately, it builds on diverse approaches to make a case for exploring knowledge and analysing concepts and images in a non-dualist and pluralist manner. This unique book will appeal to scholars and students in educationstudies and educational research, media and communication, and anyone interested in applied semiotics, visual and multimodal pedagogy and learning.
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Yes, you can access Inquiry Graphics in Higher Education by Nataša Lackovi?,Nataša Lackovi? in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Education & Educational Psychology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.
(S. Lem, Solaris, translated by J. Kilmartin and S. Cox. C 6 ‘The Little Apocrypha’, p. 72, 1970)
End Abstract
The epigraph from Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem suggests that humans are searching for an ideal image of our world in outer space. This image, including the search itself and the very concept of “superiority” (or inferiority), is imbued with human sociocultural heritage and histories. It is underpinned by a presumption or perhaps a hope that a putative alien community or individual entity would share some features with our own civilization, for example our interpretative organs and the sense of time and space. The quote reminded me of the Pioneer plaque picture, the image designed to communicate key information about humans and Earth pictorially to tentative intelligent extraterrestrials, sent into and now beyond outer solar system space on NASA Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, in 1972 and 1973. Figure 1.1 shows a drawing of the plaque, originally devised by Carl Sagan, Frank Drake and Linda Salzman Sagan.
The team who created the plaque tried to represent humans and the world in the way that seemed to them to be most effective and representative. This was and would always be a hard task. Those who worked on it deserve our appreciation for trying to do it and then producing it. As the intention behind the Pioneer plaque is broadly to communicate key facts about humans and human positioning in the solar system via only one image/ illustration, it is no wonder that its interpretations have raised controversies. Some of the issues included the represented nudity and what is suggested as a subservient and passive position of the woman in the image, as opposed to the man who is waving. Inquiring the Pioneer picture and its depicted elements do not stop with these examples. NASA’s web site1 provides these explanations of the image: “The key to translating the plaque lies in understanding the breakdown of the most common element in the universe— hydrogen (…) Anyone from a scientifically educated civilization having enough knowledge of hydrogen would be able to translate the message.” Yet, how many people on Earth at this very moment are familiar with the drawn hydrogen symbol at the top left corner and cosmic pulsars spreading centrally on the left part of the plaque (see Fig. 1.1)? A good part of educated humanity, let alone the putative alien life, may not have the implied knowledge required for intended interpretation.
The reference to the Pioneer plaque is important as it points at a common presumption by a human message creator that others would make meaning of the message as its creator intended, or in similar ways. While we only have our human nature as the basis for creating messages for aliens hoping they could decode it somehow, we do have an opportunity to tackle the question of interpretation in the context of the university. If higher education involves a message exchange between teachers and learners, we may also agree that it still provides much more space and time for the production and dissemination of resources and teachers’ messages to learners, rather than the opportunities for learners to externalize their own interpretations (of these messages and resources) in order to exchange meanings in a more equal manner. What the plaque exemplifies is something very human, perhaps the very thing that makes us human: humans (1) interpret the world from their own experiences and point of view, from their unique biological, cultural, epistemological and ontological stance; and humans (2) create things and content that act as signs-for-interpretations from their own experiences and point of view, from their unique biological, cultural, epistemological and ontological stance. A simple truth about the central importance of interpretation, artifact creation and meaning-making processes in human life (Worth & Gross, 1974), still marginally explored and acknowledged in higher education studies. This book accounts for the externalization of learners’ interpretation and meaning-making, focusing on image and concept pluralism as mediators of such an externalization.
The challenge of universal message and representativeness linked to the Pioneer plaque was tackled by Director Boris Kozlov in the award-winning video “The Postmodern Pioneer Plaque.”2 The video was produced to consider what a postmodern Pioneer plaque could look like.3 It suggests that it would have to include a range of images to account for representative diversity of living beings and things on our planet). Indeed, in today’s world we still need more images that show diverse human experiences, capabilities and identities, including non-human beings and things, and that is one of many reasons why we need to talk about images in higher education, while they saturate learners’ digital media. Arguably, images can show exclusive representations. They can lead to excluding visually impaired and blind learners. The inclusion of accessible pictures in academic publications or student work is still more demanding than including words or numbers. However, these reasons should inspire changes in higher education practices, to face and tackle images in order to understand their role, what they do and do not do for learning, knowledge, social relations and inclusion, and what should be done about it. Avoidance of such changes is a part of contemporary pedagogies at universities; they are glottocentric and logocentric; they privilege verbal communication, reasoning and theory, marginalizing other senses (Cobley, 2016). In that way, these pedagogies are exclusive. The arguments in this book are linked to images, but the relational approach argued in the book encapsulates a general inclusion of diverse senses and emotions as integral in learning and knowledge.4
1.1. The Underexplored Dimensions of Higher Education Studies
Exploring how images and other signs in communication make meaning, which can inform learning and knowledge, is an aspect of the discipline of semiotics.5 This discipline, broadly speaking, studies signs and how they mediate meaning-making and action by humans and diverse organisms in diverse environments. The Pioneer plaque image can be defined as an illustration, a pictorial external image, a type of graphic, and a semiotic sign. Signs mediate interpretations. One of sign’s definitions, according to Peirce’s triadic sign diagram, is “(a) sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (CP 2.218).6 It emphasizes that three things are necessary for sign meaning-making: some sensation or sign form/ vehicle; the mind that interprets it; and the physically or virtually existent object that the sign vehicle expresses, and the minds interpret. Translated into a photographic sign, this would be photographic content that embodies an object in the external world (existing although possibly invented and/or digitally fabricated), interpreted by someone (some mind). If we accept that thinking and conceptual development in higher education are mediated by semiotic signs of various kinds, the perspectives of semiotics are highly relevant to higher education, although studies in higher education rarely adopt semiotic approaches, as will be shown in the next section. As Quay (2017, p. 79) argues, “much more research needs to be done to connect education and semiotics as regards teaching and learning.” Inquiry graphics do this in the present work.
The Pioneer plaque, as well as the imagery discussed in this chapter, belongs to the group of objects termed graphics (from Greek γραφικός, graphikos, “belonging to drawing”), broadly referring to shapes, images or designs that leave a material or digital trace on a surface (e.g., on a wall, digital screen, paper), including photographs, murals, drawings but also numbers, graphs, diagrams and data visualizations. This book considers pictorial (depictive) images as distinct types of graphics or graphic signs, such as illustrations and photographs, with the focus on digital photographs.
Although Pioneer 10 signal loss occurred in 2003, we can say with certainty that at least two graphics were launched in outer space, further away from the Earth than any human being has reached so far, forever representing humanity. In contrast to the lonely floating Pioneer plaques, of course, it is fair to say that graphics abound on planet Earth, all around us in urban environments. Imagine yourself in the street of a city. Imagine walking around guided by your senses, one of them being vision. If I consider the act of seeing, I cannot help but be aware of a myriad of pictures, posters, artifacts, graffiti, murals, designs and advertisements, of people’s gaze fixed on their cellphones. The whole environment is swarming with icons and symbols promoting and reinforcing notions of what the world is like, how it should be and how it can be, creating a phantasmagoric landscape of desires, dreams, biases and ideologies (Ewen & Ewen, 1992, 2006). Higher education is a part of this visual and multimodal existence. Students and educators are deeply embedded within it. In the contemporary world of an unprecedented pixilation around humans and on social media, higher education studies and research are still echoing the concerns raised by David Sless (1981, p. 180) back in the 1980s:
the overall culture in our societies is increasingly dominated by hybrid forms that use many visual forms of communication which our education system either ignores or simply takes for granted. If our general education does not, in the formative years, develop and enlarge the expectations students have of visual materials, we lose a potential method of understanding which higher education cannot fully take advantage of without engaging in the remedial activity.
Despite the proliferation of visual media in students’ lives, it can be said that postgraduate programs in higher education still do not consider photographs in the media as a potential “higher level” learning or analytical resource, apart from the programs, subjects and schools that are traditionally labeled as image-friendly or “visual.” However, this approach is needed in order to address the current state of human–media interaction in a world “of hyper-visuality, in a world of remediation and cross-mediation in which experience of content both appears in multiple forms and migrates from one form to anothe...
