This presentation reports on a critical visual analysis of Latinx-themed picturebooks illustrated by Latinx artists and published in the US from 1990 to 2025. It specifically examines how these illustrators weave cultural beliefs and values into these titles using visual details, iconic cultural references, and complex techniques in their visual narratives on ceremonies like Día de los muertos and naming children after ancestors, among others. Participants will receive a comprehensive list of the titles analyzed and participate in discussions of their applications across various educational contexts.
This presentation explores how visual representations of timekeeping tools and traditions function as cultural artifacts that bridge material and spiritual realms across time and space. By examining images of ancient timekeeping systems, such as Chinese and Korean water clocks and the Mayan calendar, we highlight how visual design elements like shape, color, and symbolism encode cultural values, cosmology, and practical functions. These images are not just representations of time—they are visual literacy tools that deepen our understanding of engineering, astronomy, and environmental adaptation. The presentation also connects to the concept of "underground STEM" (Jessen et al., 2022), recognizing the scientific knowledge embedded in non-Western cultural practices. By engaging with these images, participants will gain insights into how visual literacy fosters cross-cultural empathy and supports a pluralistic approach to STEM education, encouraging the inclusion of diverse cultural practices in modern STEM learning.
Aikú, Cuba is a photographic series created during the XXXII Festival del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba. The project captures a bembé—a ritual celebration rooted in Yoruba tradition that fuses music, dance, and spiritual invocation. Performed by a folkloric ensemble from Pinar del Río, each dancer embodies an Orisha deity through distinct colors, movements, and ceremonial attire.
This Campfire session begins with a visual presentation of selected photographs and cultural context, followed by an open dialogue exploring the symbolic language of sacred performance. Participants will reflect on how color, costume, and movement communicate ancestral knowledge and religious identity.
Viviana Torres-Mestey is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and researcher. Her work bridges visual literacy, design, and cultural memory. This project expands upon her doctoral research into the visual codes of Afro-Caribbean spirituality and the role of photography in documenting sacred traditions.
In 2022, Aotearoa New Zealand officially adopted the Māori new year celebration known as Matariki which falls between June 19-22. This historic moment signified another step in decolonizing the country from lingering British colonial traditions. It celebrates the first rising of the Pleiades star cluster and with it a time for reflection, reconnection, and hope for the future. Originating from a mythological story involving the god of wind, Tāwhirimātea, who in response to his parent’s separation, Ranginui the sky father and Papatūānuku the earth mother, gouged his eyes out in a temper and cast them into the skies. While the holiday is young in terms of mainstream culture, it has been a welcomed opportunity for many Māori and other New Zealand residents to engage with a ritual unique to Aotearoa. In the capital city of Wellington, they have redistributed funds from Guy Fawkes Day (historic British fireworks holiday held November 5) to an annual Matariki festival. Today, the celebration incorporates traditional mythological imagery with contemporary design and technology. It is likely that over time the sacred holiday will develop new ways of honoring Māori culture and the passage of time in Aotearoa. For a traditional celebration, people gather at dawn for a sacred ceremony involving food, prayer, songs, and moments of silence. Families take time to remember loved ones, elders share knowledge, and feasts are offered and then enjoyed. For the more casual observer, the day is simply a gathering of families and friends to share memories, company and food. These ways of connecting share much in common with indigenous cultures around the world that celebrate the Pleiades star cluster at varying times of the year. Matariki emphasizes the power of nature and seasons over western notions of time, and in doing so asserts Māori sovereignty. This presentation will provide a survey of the aesthetics surrounding Matariki festivities, including art in a variety of formats, both independent and commercially produced.
This presentation explores how picturebooks about death help children honor loss and embrace healing. Analyzing selected picturebooks from diverse cultural backgrounds, this study examines how illustrations convey emotional experiences of grief and the role of cultural rituals in the healing process. With a focus on visual literacy, the research investigates how illustrations depict the identities of grieving characters and how cultural symbols and rituals support healing. Preliminary findings indicate that the main characters are portrayed by the intersections of the locations, the relationships with the deceased and the surviving loved ones, and shared activities to communicate emotional experiences of loss. Additionally, diverse cultural rituals offer symbolic pathways for remembrance, reinforce continuity with loved ones, and provide culturally embedded frameworks for processing grief. By highlighting the power of images in storytelling, this study underscores the importance of picturebooks in helping children navigate loss through culturally meaningful representations of mourning and healing.
"This presentation examines how librarians successfully integrated Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) into an innovative ""Acting for Medical Simulation"" theater course, creating an effective interdisciplinary bridge between the arts and healthcare education. Research demonstrates that VTS—an instructional method that encourages slow looking, increases diagnostic success, and fosters medical practitioners’ empathy for their patients—significantly reduces burnout and enhances empathy among medical students.
Integrating VTS and medical education can help to reveal complex patient experiences and build the emotional intelligence needed for compassionate care. This presentation will discuss the rationale for choosing VTS, the collaboration between librarians and faculty, the assignment, which included both a visual and a textual component, the librarians’ lesson plan, learning outcomes, and best practices. Through student examples, we will illustrate how this approach creates meaningful connections between visual literacy skills and empathetic patient care. Attendees will gain practical tools to implement similar cross-disciplinary initiatives at their institutions. "
In this campfire session, Eliza Gregory and Emily Merrifield will present their work with a photography history course and solicit feedback and dialogue from participants around alternative pedagogical structures for teaching visual literacy, research, and the value of original scholarship. The Sacramento State context comes with specific challenges—students are often food and housing insecure, provide caregiving for family members, work full time while attending school, and many are first generation to college. Figuring out how to push students intellectually while they are dealing with profound logistical challenges on a daily basis is difficult. We will also be eager to connect with colleagues around how to meet students where they are, and evaluate what skills are most crucial to their success going forward, while operating within a vast bureaucracy with little formal support for pedagogical innovation.
In this paper presentation, we examine how a trauma-informed art and writing program that incorporated museum, university, and community partners created space for adolescents to explore their racial, cultural, and social identities in a community organization that works with refugee youth. Informed by a critical multimodal literacy framework, we ask: "How do critical multimodal literacies create space for youth to explore and express their racial, gender, cultural, and social identities?" We utilized a qualitative case study approach focused on visual and multimodal qualitative research methods. Our findings suggest that a) multiple modes of expression created opportunities for youth to center their identities within the context of their cultural backgrounds; b) writing alongside their art allowed youth to interrogate existing power structures through harnessing the power of images as cultural tools; and c) multimodal literacies enabled students to imagine possibilities and identities of past, present, and future selves while navigating cultural expectations and influences. Our study has implications for the affordances of how trauma-informed and art-based literacy practices can better help students express the complexities of their adolescent experience across diverse cultural contexts.
Framed within a musically enhanced self-inquiry (MESI) methodology and design, our study leverages the assets of reflexive visual data to further problematize the oversimplified and often essentialized characteristics found in the ubiquitous positionality statements now required in qualitative inquiry. Perhaps encouraged with good intentions, these statements often end up re-centering colonial privileges. We also demonstrate the ways multimodal methodologies support and enhance the sense-making and reflexive acts required to illustrate our complex academic positionalities in relation to the social categories assigned to us. Engaging in reflexivity through multimodalities can be a useful tool for education practitioners, counselors, educators, students to gain deeper insight.
This study explores how pre-service and in-service craft teachers perceive and utilize sketching as a cognitive, pedagogical, and embodied tool in craft education. Drawing on Embodied Cognition, the research positions sketching as a material and multimodal practice that bridges abstract thinking and hands-on making. Data was collected through a survey distributed to craft educators. Findings reveal that teachers view sketching as an important support for student planning, problem-solving, and reflection. While some educators scaffold sketching through modeling and dialogue, others rely on implicit or ad-hoc approaches. The study also highlights challenges in motivating students who resist sketching or perceive it as irrelevant. These insights underscore the need for pedagogical strategies that position sketching as an inclusive, flexible, and epistemically rich practice.
Maps have long served as more than just tools for navigation; they carry symbolic and ritualistic significance, shaping how individuals engage with the territories, the sacred, meaning making, history, and experience. This fireside session explores how maps communicate ideas through visual literacy, comparing historical and contemporary practices. We consider maps as both practical tools and metaphors for transformation, shaped by cultural perspectives and visual symbols—some universal, others deeply rooted in place and identity. Researchers will share insights from undergraduate projects that investigate mapping as practice, navigation, and symbolic exploration. A 20-minute hands-on workshop will follow, inviting participants to map a personal experience. This activity will support reflection on how we use visual communication to express meaning, and how maps can act as cultural artefacts as well as tools for connection and understanding.
The cartoon’s role is to communicate. Through visual language, the cartoonist transmits fast and immediate messages to citizens. The humor, satire, and comedy implicit in the cartoons have the power to inform and promote critical thought and a deep analysis of the facts represented. However, the cartoons are not a denotative representation of the topic discussed. They represent the author’s perspective, perception, and intention and are understood according to the reader’s knowledge, beliefs, values, and tendencies about the fact. Hence, it is essential to critically read political cartoons because the audience reinterprets the cartoonists’ representations, and they should read them regardless of the author’s intentions. This paper analyses the cartoons of two Ecuadorian cartoonists who represent the daily crucial political events. The author aims to expose the characteristics of their visual representations to reveal their intentions, ways of conveying the visual message, and how the representations have impacted the audience.
Totemic symbolism has long been a source of identity, strength, and storytelling across cultures. This presentation explores how visual totems can be used by educators to help students discover their identities and build resilience. By examining traditional and contemporary applications of totemic imagery in education, we uncover its role in fostering emotional intelligence, self-expression, and community belonging. Through workshop practices, indigenous educational models, and digital adaptations, this session highlights innovative ways to integrate visual totems into learning environments. Additionally, the practice of journaling is explored as a means of making connections between totemic symbolism and personal reflection. Attendees will gain insights into how totemic symbolism and reflective journaling enhance student engagement and resilience, making them powerful tools for educators aiming to create inclusive and identity-affirming educational experiences.
This study examines images of teaching discovered through Google Image searches and their potential to perpetuate oppressive narratives. Utilizing critical multimodal, queer, and decolonial theories, we analyze these visual/ multimodal representations and uncover dominant ideologies embedded within. The research employs collage methodologies to create visual counter-stories to these dominant narratives. Through this process, we challenge and transform the existing visual canon, illustrating how collage can serve as a powerful tool for reflexivity and narrative repair. The findings emphasize the importance of critical visual inquiry in education and suggest collage as a method for developing students' critical multimodal literacy and praxis. The findings also highlight the potential for visual (counter)storytelling to reshape perspectives on teaching and learning.
"When does an image migrate from the “iconic” to being an “icon”? How do we exemplify our attachments to image in an age of reproduction and AI? Through an exploration of the interweaving of sacred and secular imagery, this presentation will examine how and why we maintain images in close proximity to ritual.
In a modern society with fleeting attention spans and access to more visual data than ever before it is curious that we continue to create more images than ever before. What do our attachments to certain ritual images and not others relay about our own assumptions and/or ownership of others and even otherness? And, during an age where our own bodies are commodified - what do these images relay about the body as spectacle rather than a site for ritual?
With wonder at the center of this presentation, it will be imperative to examine our modern conceptions of attachments and icon worship (and by extension worship of contemporary selfhood) from a place of curiosity.
Essays, images, and writings explored will be by Praba Pilar, Alejandra Oliva, Grupo Proceso Pentágono, Simone Leigh, Hélio Oiticia, Lygia Clark, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Naomi Ricón Gallardo."
This presentation explores tarot card decks as powerful visual systems that live between sacred imagery and artistic expression, serving as both a spiritual tool and a dynamic storytelling medium. As visual texts, the cards tell universal stories: of growth, loss, transformation, discovery, love, and death, that are constantly reinterpreted by artists who call on their own cultural and lived experiences to develop the visual lexicon of their tarot deck. After learning more about the long history of tarot imagers and artists who create them, attendees will be invited to reinterpret a card from the Major Arcana—the 22 tarot cards representing archetypes and life stages. Participants will be guided through the process of creating a card of their choice, incorporating their own cultural, spiritual, and personal symbols. This activity offers a fresh perspective on cultural reinterpretations of universal stories through visual language.
"This paper begins with Demián Flores Cortés' sculpture of a figure holding a Christian cross and a statue of the Santa Muerte. Like other work that has at times been called syncretic, mestizaje, or New World baroque, the sculpture manifests the inadequacy of efforts to categorize and compartmentalize visual and artistic expression. If visual methodologies commit to a de/anti/colonial ethic and epistemology, then the time travel, insertion, and indeed infiltration of indigenous and hybrid representation do not represent a reconciling of cultures, religions, or societies, but rather a “will to survive and persist culturally”. The counter-hegemonic, or even counter-conquest reversal and resignification of iconographic conventions falling outside disciplinary traditions of analysis call for visual methods to permit the resemantization of representing and reporting on visual “data”. This paper then takes the destabilization offered by these tensions to ask: What then are the implications for visual research methods? And for visual literacy more broadly?"
November 2 post-conference dinner (set menu with vegetarian option) and then walk to a location at which to watch the Dia de Muertos parade! We cannot accommodate mobility requests for this event due to the parade location. Registered participants only.
