IDEAS: Integrated Disciplinary Education for Academic Scholarship: Books

The World Is a Text by Jonathan Silverman; Dean Rader Using the lenses of rhetoric, semiotics and cultural studies, students are encouraged to become effective academic writers while gaining deeper insights into such popular culture categories as movies, technology, race, music, ethnicity, television, media, public space, and more.

Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin; Oliver Sacks (Foreword by) Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us.

A Primer for Visual Literacy by Donis A. Dondis This primer is designed to teach students the interconnected arts of visual communication. Understanding through seeing only seems to be an obviously intuitive process. Actually, developing the visual sense is something like learning a language, with its own special alphabet, lexicon, and syntax.

Humanities and the Visual Media by Kecia Driver McBride (Editor) The proliferation of visual media and its technology--including film and television, videoconferencing and multimedia, the Internet and online communication--is transforming the way students encounter the humanities, both within and outside the classroom. These changes represent pedagogical challenges as well as new areas of content learning. In Humanities and the Visual Media, contributors from a variety of disciplines address the intersection of humanities education and the visual media in all its forms. The book begins with several essays addressing the impact of technology (including distance learning) and new modes of visual representation on pedagogical technique. Subsequent essays focus on the special uses of film and television in the teaching of writing, literary criticism, cultural studies, critical thinking, and foreign languages and culture. The contributors teach in a range of classroom environments, from Ivy League universities to community colleges. Their essays incorporate a sensitivity to the differing needs of their students and the varying levels of media literacy and technological competency among students as well as among educators. Rather than suggesting a universal pedagogy of media and technology, the authors instead share ideas about ways to incorporate the visual media into different subjects and methodologies. These essays offer diverse approaches to the visual media, including the exploration of new technologies and their usefulness to the humanities, case studies of individual texts and their visual adaptations, the development of new critical frameworks, and practical discussion of classroom techniques. These strategies will be helpful for teachers withintraditional humanities disciplines who seek to integrate visual media and technology within their courses.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger Based on the BBC television series, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.' 'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.' John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language.

Thinking and Seeing by Daniel T. Levin (Editor) Experimental research has shown that people miss apparently obvious visual discontinuities -- a phenomenon known as "change blindness." For example, in one experiment, subjects watching a brief film of a conversation between two actors did not notice that in some shots one actor appeared wearing a large, colorful scarf and in other shots she wore no scarf; in another experiment, subjects did not even notice when one actor was replaced by another between shots. Moreover, when told what they had missed, many subjects were incredulous, and occasionally even insisted that the film they had seen had not included anything unusual ("change blindness blindness"). This kind of conflict between actual and presumed cognitive functioning has been analyzed in other areas of metacognition; the contributors to Thinking and Seeing explore the implications for vision, which have remained largely unexamined. Doing so, they make important connections among diverse areas in cognitive science and provide a starting point for new research on how people think about seeing.Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of the work in this field, the contributors draw on developing theories of the mind to explore the foundations of metacognitive understanding in children and metacognition errors by adults; on traditional metacognition research to analyze potential connections between research on problem solving and vision; on research in folk psychology and concepts to examine "the illusion of explanatory depth" and how systematic our understanding of seeing is; and on an understanding of the relationship between consciousness and cognitive control of ongoing tasks.

Proust and the Visual by Nathalie Aubert (Editor) Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological category, the visual whose prominent role in the novel is at the heart of its modernity. The visual is defined as manifesting in the image not only space, but also time. The visual is considered as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator's journey towards becoming a writer and of the unfolding of the novel itself.

Perception Beyond Inference by Liliana Albertazzi (Editor, Introduction by); Gert J. Van Tonder; Dhanraj Vishwanath (Editor, Introduction by) This book breaks with the conventional model of perception that views vision as a mere inference to an objective reality on the basis of "inverse optics." The authors offer the alternative view that perception is an expressive and awareness-generating process. Perception creates semantic information in such a way as to enable the observer to deal efficaciously with the chaotic and meaningless structure present at the physical boundary between the body and its surroundings. Vision is intentional by its very nature; visual qualities are essential and real, providing an aesthetic and meaningful interface to the structures of physics and the state of the brain. This view brings perception firmly in line with ethology and modern evolutionary biology and suggests new approaches in all disciplines that study, or require an understanding of, the ontology of mind. The book is the joint effort of a multidisciplinary group of authors. Topics covered include the relationships among stimuli, neuronal processes, and visual awareness. After considering the mind-dependent growing of information, the book treats time and dynamics; color, shape, and space; language and perception; perception, art, and design.

Historical Site Ahead by Harry Jamieson Whether we are driving on the interstate highway or trying to find a new restaurant in the city, posted signs are our primary tools for navigating the world. In Visual Communication, Harry Jamieson offer a thorough analysis of this important form of communication and investigates the intricate processes behind our interaction with signs. In a groundbreaking departure from standard aesthetic and graphic-based analyses, Jamieson probes the complex connection between perception and linguistics in the use of signs. He proposes new approaches to understanding the visual experience through the use of information and language theory, and he examines the underlying ideas within visual communication studies, rather than the solutions the field proposes;but without neglecting the practical aspects of these theoretical ideas. A comprehensive resource, Visual Communication will be an essential read for scholars in media studies, visual arts, sociology, and cultural studies. Visual Communication brings back all the fervor and insight of the best analyses of visual communication and it contains numerous insights to help media practitioners, artists and educational designers to understand their crafts. Jamieson goes beyond the descriptive approach typical of broadcast and media studies analysts, and treats underlying themes of the visual in art and the media.

Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn by John Hattie; Gregory Yates On publication in 2009 John Hattie's Visible Learning presented the biggest ever collection of research into what actually work in schools to improve children's learning. Not what was fashionable, not what political and educational vested interests wanted to champion, but what actually produced the best results in terms of improving learning and educational outcomes. It became an instant bestseller and was described by the TES as revealing education's 'holy grail'. Now in this latest book, John Hattie has joined forces with cognitive psychologist Greg Yates to build on the original data and legacy of the Visible Learning project, showing how it's underlying ideas and the cutting edge of cognitive science can form a powerful and complimentary framework for shaping learning in the classroom and beyond. Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn explains the major principles and strategies of learning, outlining why it can be so hard sometimes, and yet easy on other occasions. Aimed at teachers and students, it is written in an accessible and engaging style and can be read cover to cover, or used on a chapter-by-chapter basis for essay writing or staff development. The book is structured in three parts - 'learning within classrooms', 'learning foundations', which explains the cognitive building blocks of knowledge acquisition and 'know thyself' which explores, confidence and self-knowledge. It also features extensive interactive appendices containing study guide questions to encourage critical thinking, annotated bibliographic entries with recommendations for further reading, links to relevant websites and YouTube clips. Throughout, the authors draw upon the latest international research into how the learning process works and how to maximise impact on students, covering such topics as: teacher personality; expertise and teacher-student relationships; how knowledge is stored and the impact of cognitive load; thinking fast and thinking slow; the psychology of self-control; the role of conversation at school and at home; invisible gorillas and the IKEA effect; digital native theory; myths and fallacies about how people learn. This fascinating book is aimed at any student, teacher or parent requiring an up-to-date commentary on how research into human learning processes can inform our teaching and what goes on in our schools. It takes a broad sweep through findings stemming mainly from social and cognitive psychology and presents them in a useable format for students and teachers at all levels, from preschool to tertiary training institutes.

Visual Literacy by James Elkins (Editor) What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the West, in Asia, or in developing nations? If we all need to become "visually literate," what does that mean in practical terms? The essays gathered here examine a host of issues surrounding "the visual," exploring national and regional ideas of visuality and charting out new territories of visual literacy that lie far beyond art history, such as law and chemistry. With an afterword by Christopher Crouch, this groundbreaking collection brings together the work of major art and visual studies scholars and critics to explore what impact the new concept of "visual literacy" will have on the traditional field of art history. Contributors Matthias Bruhn, Vera Dunkel, Jonathan Crary, Christopher Crouch, Peter Dallow, James Elkins, Henrik Enquist, W.J.T. Mitchell, Richard K. Sherwin, Susan Shifrin, Jon Simons, Barbara Maria Stafford, William Washabaugh"

Cases on Teaching Critical Thinking Through Visual Representation Strategies by Leonard J. Shedletsky (Editor); Jeffrey S. Beaudry (Editor) This book brings together research from scholars and professionals in the field of education to provide new insights into the use of visual aids for student development in reasoning and critical thinking--

Writing for Visual Thinkers by Andrea Marks 'Writing for Visual Thinkers' is designed to help people who think in pictures - a segment of learners that by some estimates includes almost 30 percent of the population - gain skills and confidence in their writing abilities.