Developing thinking skills through the visual: An a/r/tographical journey

Abstract

This article reports on research that investigated how students’ critical thinking skills can be developed through images. The research was located in New Zealand, a country whose national curriculum and assessment systems stress ‘thinking’ as a key competency and place emphasis on developing visual literacies. The research was underpinned by a critique of the impact of images on students living in an image-saturated world and the importance of them being visually literate. It involved examination and documentation of strategies used by two teachers to foster the critical thinking of year 13 students in visual arts education and their responses to those experiences. The research was positioned within an a/r/tographical framework, a method which links art, research and teaching, and privileges both text and image. The findings, presented as an integration of participant and researcher ‘voice’ and the ‘visual’, illustrate the profound effects of critical looking practice through an enquiry framework.