Graphicacy and Culture

Xenia Danos' book contributes to the creation of a platform for education in the area of graphicacy and refocusing on visual learning. The foundation for the book is Xenia's literature review concerning the development of graphicacy in humans. Despite exploring over 2000 references, the prior research was limited in scope, but raised many potentially interesting points of departure. Ken Baynes puts this literature review in context with an opening essay on the significance of the visual in Western culture. He explores the role of graphicacy in cultural change, its role in establishing continuities, and particularly its significance for shaping the future through modelling and design. After discussing graphicacy in education, its development and progression, and relationship to students' learning, Xenia presents a new taxonomy that she designed primarily to facilitate the analysis of graphicacy across educational curricula, although it has wider application. Graphicacy is vital to an extraordinary range of human activities ranging from design to archaeology. It is a key medium for communicating ideas, information and proposals in everyday life. A feature of Xenia's book is a number of case studies demonstrating current graphic practice in professions as diverse as dentistry, psychotherapy and engineering. Taken together they serve to substantiate her argument for the use of graphic media as a means of learning and expression in education. The book's purpose is to get graphicacy on the educational agenda and it makes a powerful case.The book also provides a framework for more specialist forthcoming LDP titles that take the connection between graphicacy and design into related areas of practice and education.

Autorentext

Xenia Danos' academic career started with a BA followed by a PGCE in Design & Technology for Secondary Education at Middlesex University. After teaching KS3, GCSE, and A-level Design & Technology for 3 years in a UK school, she completed a PhD on Graphicacy at Loughborough University. She then moved to Cyprus where she worked in the Department of Education at the University of Cyprus for 2 years. In collaboration with the head of the department, she ran the PGCE Design and Technology course for preschool and primary school teacher trainees. She supervised the students on teaching practice and acted as a mentor and mediator between the university and the schools. Xenia now works as a researcher in the Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Cyprus. Xenia's research so far, has concerned visual communication (graphicacy), which is the creative development and communication of ideas and information through images and symbols e.g. maps, diagrams and photographs. The power of images has wide possibilities and great potential for the enhancement of teaching and learning. Through her work she has identified and defined what graphicacy is, investigated how it is used across secondary school curricula, how children engage with it and ultimately what effects it has on students' learning. Her PhD research was based on determining students' skills and abilities through assessing work completed in a classroom context in order to design and deliver robust strategies to enhance educational performance, from individual to national level. Currently she is continuing her research on graphicacy through a European-funded project, looking to develop formative and summative assessment tools for graphicacy elements, as well as researching a new area of interest concerning creative behaviours in Design and Technology, Science and Mathematics within school curricula.