Visualising Academia: How to Make Academia Attractive (A Teaching Case Study highlighting the visual essay as a creative means of teaching academic practice)

The central focus of this paper is concerned with the visual essay case study, as a means of teaching academic practice to students, whilst sustaining a design culture within design education. Visualising academia reflects a different approach to the production and demonstration of critical and theoretical work, whereby students produce and present a visual essay as opposed to a traditional written format. It maintains the core values of academic practice, where the content is validated and contextualised, following standard academic means. However visual essays also offer students with a means of representing their work in a structured visual format and articulate this using various forms of multimedia. There are a wide ranging number of reasons why this work is important. Firstly, the visual essay was developed because some students within Art and Design get frustrated with academic tasks. What they want to do is design. By having such variety and scope provides students with the opportunity to develop and enhance a variety of skills; not simply their writing abilities. The Art and Design subject area has the highest number of dyslexic students, so, the visual essay offers curriculum and educational practice which is more inclusive to a wide variety of learners’ needs. It is not simply the production of the visual essay which offers these opportunities for academic learning, as students are asked to present these to a student audience. Having these peer-review opportunities during the presentation of the Visual essay widens students’ awareness and understanding of academic essays further and encouraging debate and discussion.