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'The message is the medium’: Evaluating the use of visual images to provoke engagement and active learning in politics and international relations lectures

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-04-27, 10:03 authored by David RobertsDavid Roberts
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 format

Pages

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

2017-04-13

Publication date

2017

Notes

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

1467-9256

Language

  • en