On Visuospatial Learning
This week’s readings are timely ones, as I’m about to begin a unit on drafting visual elements in my 305 course. I found Lauer and Sanchez’s “Visuospatial Thinking in the Professional Writing Classroom” to be particularly useful as I prepare to work with students on incorporating visuals into their projects.
In essence, Lauer and Sanchez argue for a greater awareness of students’ visuospatial ability, defined as the “ability to manipulate, maintain and manage spatial information” (187-188), in the professional writing classroom. Because of the increased use of visuals in professional writing contexts and in our culture as a whole, visual literacy has become an important component in the curriculum. Assessing students’ visual ability may be challenging, however.
I find this article valuable because it corresponds so well to my experiences in the classroom. As Lauer and Sanchez note, “When teaching design, instructors may struggle to provide feedback to some students who seem to understand by rote the design principles but are unable to appropriately apply hem. In contrast, other students, in the same class, who receive the same instruction, are somehow able to apply the principles in dynamic and cohesive ways” (187). This statement just about sums up my experiences with teaching students design thus far.
Although we are just beginning the visual unit, elements of design have been a part of the course from the first day. We have discussed effectively using white space, color, font size, and other elements to craft user-friendly documents. Almost every student is able to articulate the basic principles of design we’ve covered thus far. However, only a few seem able to translate those ideas into practice. Their documents simply do not reflect the knowledge about design they are able to demonstrate orally and using written text.
Lauer and Sanchez point to differences in visuospatial ability to explain the discrepancies in their students’ work, and I’m inclined to believe that this may be the case in my classroom as well. Although I have not surveyed my students’ background in design (but as a result of reading this article, that’s the first thing I will do at the beginning of the unit), I suspect many of them come from educational backgrounds that privilege the verbal, as I have. In many ways, I am learning right along with my students.
The authors suggest an increased focus on the visual during the invention stage of the writing process. They provide a number of examples of activities to encourage visual thinking about problems. For example, they suggest that instead of simply asking students to create notes and lists about audience, instructors should ask students to complete exercises that ask them to think through ways to represent this information visually (208).
The entire semester, my students and I have talked about audience awareness. The textbook I use repeats this point in some way or another in each chapter, and every student seems to have internalized this information. However, it never occurred to me to ask students to articulate audience values visually. As Lauer and Sanchez explain in their conclusion, many instructors lack training in visual design, and I count myself among them. Almost everything I know is self-taught, and I often find myself depending on the textbook to guide me on assessing the visual elements of student work. I do not believe my own deficiencies have greatly affected my ability to teach students about design, but I also recognize this is an area I need to work on (and probably a lot). By incorporating Lauer and Sanchez’s suggestion to ask students to think about problems both verbally and visually, I hope to improve the visual design section of my course and gain some confidence in teaching and providing feedback on visual elements in student documents.
Work Cited
Lauer, C., & Sanchez, C.A. (2011). Visuospatial thinking in the professional writing classroom. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 25(2), 184-218. doi:10.1177/1050651910389149