Visual Media & The Humanities

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 within traditional humanities disciplines who seek to integrate visual media and technology within their courses.

 Kecia Driver McBride is an assistant professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She teaches late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature, cinema studies, and cultural studies.