Roberts_document.pdf (1.71 MB)
'The message is the medium’: Evaluating the use of visual images to provoke engagement and active learning in politics and international relations lectures
Globalization and digitization have combined to create a ‘pictorial turn’ that has
transformed communication landscapes. Routine exposure to visual stimuli like images
has acculturated our students’ learning processes long before their arrival at university. But when they reach us, we expose them to text-centric teaching out of kilter with the worlds from which they come. More importantly, emerging scholarship argues that such textual hegemony is out of kilter with how they learn. This article describes a 3-year experiment to assess the veracity of such claims. It found that student academic
engagement was greater when apposite images were applied. In addition, the experiment
revealed that introducing imagery triggered active learning behaviours. The article
concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for Politics and International Relations teaching, and with proposals for diversifying research methods through a recently-formed Community of Practice.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Politics (Oxford): cutting edge political science in short-article formatPages
1 - 33 (33)Citation
ROBERTS, D., 2017. 'The message is the medium’: Evaluating the use of visual images to provoke engagement and active learning in politics and international relations lectures. Politics, 38 (2), pp.232-249.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by SAGE Publications (UK and US)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-04-13Publication date
2017Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Politics and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717717229.ISSN
1467-9256Publisher version
Language
- en