News & Events

The Center is proud to announce that Dr. Kris Bell is the recipient of our inaugural Outstanding Dissertation Award. Their dissertation used multimodal narrative inquiry as a method to  explore critical meaning-making in teacher education. The dissertation is available via ProQuest. 

11am-2pm PT

A free workshop exploring critical collaborative collage as a methodology for qualitative research, as a critical pedagogical practice, and as a counternarrative practice. Register for the workshop using the RSVP form. 

Dr. Cappello & Dr. Barton joined with other CVL faculty fellows and graduate student researchers to present a panel titled Visual thinking strategies: An expansive method for qualitative inquiry at the AERA 2026 conference. 

The Center for Visual Literacies is happy to announce the appointment of Dr. Reka Barton (University of Maryland) as its new co-director alongside current director Dr. Marva Cappello. While the center is still officially housed at SDSU, we will start rolling out bicoastal programming soon, so stay tuned!

Our research conference responded to concurrent pandemics related to racial injustice in the U.S. Among our goals was to initiate a national research agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. A conference focused on visual and multimodal methodologies is urgently needed because while students’ worlds have become increasingly visual, classroom practices and educational research methods still privilege written and spoken words. Further, for minoritized youth in this time of racial crisis, images often function as visual microaggressions that represent and perpetuate racist ideas and beliefs about people of color. Yet visual texts and visual-based methods can be used as tools for activism and tools for communicating hope. Our conference harnessed that hope, as we came together to discuss how visual-based educational research might support children who are experiencing racialized violence at this moment of crisis. Further, our conference sought to examine the ways expansive visual and multimodal methodologies provide new insights about diverse children’s and youth’s educational capital and racial literacies while disrupting and dismantling deficit perspectives about them.

During our two-day gathering, we convened participants to: 1) build community with an interdisciplinary group of education scholars and artists who utilize visual and multimodal methods in a range of contexts for the specific purpose of educational equity that validate the learning and multiple identities of diverse children and youth; 2) provide a forum where ideas can be exchanged through seminars, presentations, and interactive sessions; 3) create opportunities to develop joint research projects; 4) publish an edited volume that features the work from the conference centering visual scholarship that promotes educational equity and racial justice for youth.

Teaching about multimodal texts using a visual grammar some experiences from Australian classrooms

Visual thinking strategies symposium with keynote speaker Philip Yenawine, co-creator of VTS

Multimodal content analysis - considering multiple modes in qualitative research

What dreams may come true: examining the career aspirations of students of color through drawings

A day of dynamic and innovative presentations and discussions at the Center for Visual Literacies' Inaugural Symposium. Thank you Dr. Albers, Dr. Serafini, roundtable presenters, and guests!