Teaching With Images: Visual and material documents in non-art contexts
Sarahh Scher, Faculty Fellow for Adjunct Support, Center For Teaching Innovation

Goals for teaching with images:

Awareness of context
Develop critical thinking skills
Enhance observation and interpretive skills
Promote polysemic understanding
Learn to think in ways that are practiced by experts

Teaching strategies:

Do not assume that students know how to interpret images.
Provide scaffolding questions, working from the bottom to the top of Bloom's taxonomy (see example questions).

Do not overwhelm students with too many images.
Only incorporate images where they are relevant.
Caption images whenever possible. Provide creator of the image (i.e., artist, photographer, corporation name), the title of work, and its date. Treat an image or object as you would any other historical source.
Make students question the reliability of images, especially photographs.
Choose an image or object that lends itself to deep analysis by students. This works best when the image is one that reflects (intentionally or not) a particular opinion, point of view, or perspective.
Bear in mind that many fine art images are propaganda, and were intended to be.

Example questions for artworks or objects based on Bloom's taxonomy:

Level 1: Remember

What do we see?
What characterizes the time period this object or artwork is from?

Level 2: Understand

How does this piece fit into the characteristics discussed at Level 1, question 2?
What level of society produced this (artist and/or patron)?
Who were the intended viewers/users?

Level 3: Apply

What do the clothing, actions, location, or other elements of a work of art, or the materials of an object, tell us about the people portrayed or using them?
What does the composition of the work of art (the way it is arranged visually) tell us?
What do the decorations on an object tell us?
What does the wear on an object tell us?

Level 4: Analyze

How similar or different is this work from others of its time and place?
How does it reflect social and political realities?
Is it telling the “truth”?

Level 5: Evaluate

Use knowledge from class work/homework to support observations and analysis in discussion.
Choose an object or artwork that can be analyzed in dialogue with the original.

Level 6: Create

Create research paper or project that places the object or artwork in stylistic, social, political (etc.) context.