Visual Conceptual Exploration Using Inquiry Graphic

Abstract

Summary of Teaching & Learning Context Year 1 undergraduate Social care programme, Module name: Creative Approaches (art) to Social Care Rationale for this learning approach Visuals are powerful devices for active knowledge construction and deep authentic learning. Presented here is an active learning task that teaches threshold concepts and brings critical awareness of how the visual world can influence, persuade and transmit ideas and messages often unbeknownst to us (MacGiollaRí, 2020). This novel approach brings together threshold concept (TC) theory and inquiry graphics theory as ‘threshold graphics’ (TG) (Lacković, 2020a) utilising the abundance of visual materials, often an untapped resource. Threshold graphics, as a teaching method, offers a critical approach for connecting often abstract and language-centric conceptual knowledge to everyday embodied, material and visual experience, using static or moving images as key vehicles of conceptual inquiry. Learning threshold concepts may then be mediated by exploring semiotic or ‘sign’ relations in between an abstract concept or theory and their embodied manifestations via diverse visual media, chosen or created by students and/ or teachers to represent their subjective experiences. Also by representing concepts visually, troublesome knowledge ‘gaps’ can be identified, shared and worked thereby with an effective gateway to significant knowledge exploration, acquisition, critical engagement and conceptual knowledge integration.