Dr Rebecca Beirne

Within our growing knowledge economy, students increasingly encounter disciplines such as history, politics, philosophy, and education through the intersection of new media technologies and popular culture, rather than through the once typical encounter with ‘the book’. Visual culture dominates everyday experience and is becoming increasingly important in teaching and learning (Goldfarb, 2002). Recognising that we live at a time when students prefer to engage with visual media rather than written text, Rosenstone (2001) has dubbed the present age ‘post-literate’, an age where everyone can read but no one will. Prensky (2007) describes the current generation transitioning from schools into the workforce and tertiary education as ‘digital natives’, for whom graphics precede written text as one of the defining features of their engagement in learning. This project recognises the significant work using visual media texts in teaching and learning occurring across the humanities and social science disciplines of the contemporary academy in areas such as history (Bennett & Beirne, 2011; Sealey, 2008), social work (Downey, Jackson, Puig, & Furman, 2003; Ello, 2007), and philosophy (Falzon, 2007; Mulhall, 2002); and its take up as both pedagogy and curriculum in the field of Education (Anderson & Jefferson, 2009). Through developing a dialogue across the Humanities and Social Science disciplines at the University of Newcastle, this project explores how, for what purpose, and to what effect, visual media (including film, television, still images, vodcasts, animation, social media and imaging technologies) are used by academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences to produce 21st century professionals and enhance the student experience. Through surveys, collection of learning artifacts and focus group interviews, it begins to develop an understanding of the variety of texts, assessment strategies and pedagogical approaches used by academics at the case site. Overall the project found that there is a broad continuum of use of visual media texts in the classrooms of academics that participated in the study. It makes a number of recommendations for facilitating and enhancing the use of visual media in tertiary classrooms.