A Slow Approach to Visual Literacy in Higher Education: Lesson Plans for Critical Discernment

Rethinking visual literacy, slow librarianship champions reflection, collaboration, and focused observation. It provides flexible lesson plans and practical strategies for selecting and sharing images intentionally while nurturing slow looking and creating for sustained learning. The principles of “slow librarianship”—which prioritizes reflection, collaboration, solidarity, and valuing all kinds of contributions—can also support deeper and more sustained learning and understanding. This book emphasizes the importance of attention and focus to the process of visual literacy, demonstrating how this approach supports ACRL’s Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education and the Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education. Library workers, educators, and instructors will discover dozens of flexible lesson plans for teaching visual literacy, scaffolded by competency levels: novice, intermediate, and advanced; ways to integrate slow looking into the classroom, emphasizing careful observation and the sustained act of looking; techniques for showing learners how to select images with intention, as well as carefully determine when and how to share those images; reasons why slow creating is essential to understanding and applying visual literacy in the twenty-first century; and a look at how increasing access to internet connectivity, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and new ethics for sharing and using information online will affect the future of visual literacy.