Precis: “Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication Across the Curriculum” by Barb Blakely Duffelmeyer and Anthony Ellertson

             The primary and most important aim of a rhetorical education is to prepare students for not only future classes, but to help them become informed, discriminating, critical members of society. Indeed, this is not only an aim, but an obligation. However, the purely textual rhetoric currently being taught in most American universities is shockingly behind the times in an age where students receive an immediate and never ending stream of visual information. Furthermore, these visual texts are more than pictures, singular and static. They’re in motion, dynamic, frenetic, ever changing. Because contemporary students have grown up immersed in a mode of passive reception of what the television and the internet convey as the truth, they’ve never questioned those truths. They’ve never had a reason. And no one has (at least successfully) problematized the world that surrounds them or nudged them out of complacency. The rhetoric classroom can and should do that. First, the academy has to move past its seeming disdain for media as a somehow lesser form of expression. This is the reality. Visual rhetoric is as textual as any other sort of rhetoric and just as valid.
          In the proper multimedia environment – one that would employ multifunction and interactive programs like Flash over the more easily manipulated hypertext – students would create visual rhetorical texts, mixing and manipulating a number of objects/components to effectively communicate a specific message. Aside from learning to use possibly new media and, of course, acquiring rhetorical skills, students begin to understand first-hand the extent to which the visuals to which they’re exposed are carefully crafted and controlled by the creator(s). Thus, the “veil of familiarity” is lifted. The experience leaves them with a more sophisticated understanding of how rhetoric is employed in culture and how they, thus, need to question who’s saying what and why they’re saying it. A successfully executed visual rhetoric class will yield the following results for students:
• They’ll understand that text – of any form – does not simply exist, but is created and manipulated.
• They’ll be able to perceive text and acquire agency as both audience and creator.