Reclaiming the right to look: making the case for critical visual literacy and data science education

As visual cultures scholars have argued, visual expression and aesthetic artifacts largely comprise the modern world. This includes the production of the school as an institution. A critical approach to education therefore must reinscribe students with the ability to see what educational processes attempt to hide and to construct an understanding of the real for themselves. To illustrate this argument, we explore the production of visuality within data science education as one example of how the visual manifests within schools. In response, we propose a visual literacy informed approach to engaging students with data, one that expands beyond contemporary forms of critical data literacy by involving an ontological critique of educational aestheticization. To ground this work, we examine the role of visuality and aesthetics within the implementation of co-designed arts-infused data science projects in four US middle schools. In analyzing interviews with teachers and students, we uncover a series of tensions that reveal the ongoing influence of school visualities alongside the potential for student generated images to amplify their right to look. We therefore argue that critical pedagogies must not only involve reading and critiquing aesthetic artifacts but also engage students in a critique of visuality itself

Depicting the tree of life in museums: guiding principles from psychological research

The Tree of Life is revolutionizing our understanding of life on Earth, and, accordingly, evolutionary trees are increasingly important parts of exhibits on biodiversity and evolution. The authors argue that in using these trees to effectively communicate evolutionary principles, museums need to take into account research results from cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology while maintaining a focus on visitor engagement and enjoyment. Six guiding principles for depicting evolutionary trees in museum exhibits distilled from this research literature were used to evaluate five current or recent museum trees. One of the trees was then redesigned in light of the research while preserving the exhibit’s original learning goals. By attending both to traditional factors that influence museum exhibit design and to psychological research on how people understand diagrams in general and Tree of Life graphics in particular, museums can play a key role in fostering 21st century scientific literacy

Students’ perceptions of the impacts of peer ideas in inquiry learning

Peer ideas can be valuable contributions to scientific inquiry. Divergent peer ideas can enrich students' thinking and encourage curiosity. Meanwhile, similar peer ideas can promote convergent thinking that can reinforce understanding. However, students need guidance in critically evaluating peer ideas in relation to their own, and in recognizing the influence of peers’ ideas. Guided by the Knowledge Integration framework, we explore whether students’ perceptions of the impact of peers’ ideas align with the revisions made to their written explanations. In a technology-rich, classroom-based inquiry unit on cancer cell division, Grade 7 students (N = 144) investigated the effects of different cancer treatments on cell division, and developed explanations for a recommended treatment. We prompted one group of students to visit a class repository to seek peer ideas similar to their own, and another to seek ideas different from their own. Both groups then revised their recommendations. Based on analyses of students' reflections, initial and revised explanations, and pre and posttests, we found that students prompted to seek divergent ideas perceived peers’ ideas to be more impactful, even though both groups of students revised at the same rate and made similar pre to posttest gains. This study suggests a need to attend to students’ perceptions of the roles of their peers, particularly in environments designed to reflect authentic processes of the social construction of scientific knowledge

Promoting students’ informal inferential reasoning through arts-integrated data literacy education

PurposeArts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as school organization and culture, can pose barriers to subject integration. We describe synergies and tensions between data science and the arts, and how these can create or constrain opportunities for learners to engage in IIR.Design/methodology/approachWe co-designed and implemented four arts-integrated data literacy units with 10 teachers of arts and mathematics in middle school classrooms from four different schools in the United States. Our data include student-generated artwork and their written rationales, and interviews with teachers and students. Through maximum variation sampling, we identified examples from our data to illustrate disciplinary synergies and tensions that appeared to support different IIR processes among students.FindingsAspects of artistic representation, including embodiment, narrative, and visual image; and aspects of the culture of arts, including an emphasis on personal experience, the acknowledgement of subjectivity, and considerations for the audience’s perspective, created synergies and tensions that both offered and hindered opportunities for IIR (i.e., going beyond data, using data as evidence, and expressing uncertainty). Originality/valueThis study answers calls for humanistic approaches to data literacy education. It contributes an interdisciplinary perspective on data literacy that complements other context-oriented perspectives on data science. This study also offers recommendations for how designers and educators can capitalize on synergies and mitigate tensions between domains to promote successful IIR in arts-integrated data literacy education