Recent reports on the media saturation experienced by the twenty-first century student have brought about an increased interest in focusing attention on the issue of visual literacy in today's schools. Concepts such as instructional personalization, where approaches to curriculum design and instruction are created to concentrate on the individual strengths of the learner, have been promoted by some as a path to improving overall student performance. Many believe that the content of the Social Studies classroom easily lends itself to a visually stimulating approach and as such is an ideal laboratory to test hypotheses on such an approach. This study examines the use of one such visual tool in the Social Studies content arena, the political cartoon. Political cartoons are believed to be ideally suited to appeal to the visually oriented characteristics of the millennial student in the form of a potentially content rich primary source document. Described within the pages of this paper are the unique experiences with using political cartoons from the perspective of both middle school American History students and their teacher. The qualitative data uncovered through the collection of these experiences clearly illustrates a noticeable disparity between teacher and student experiences with cartoons from the present and their counterparts from the past. While present day cartoons covering various recent events in the news elicited an impressive level of informational recall and personal connections to the topics covered, the results were considerably less spectacular when political cartoons from the distant past were utilized. Those older images were more difficult for the students to grasp the artist's intent and failed as an opportunity for the students to demonstrate their mastery of content knowledge. It was concluded through an examination of interviews from both teacher and student that the differences observed between the older and newer images may be a function of several factors. Chief among these possible explanations from the point of view of the student was the lifelong collection of experiences that each child brought with them to the process of analyzing a political cartoon. The unique cultural capital possessed by each student as a result of their daily, almost nonstop exposure to all forms of media created a personal connection to the modern material that could not be matched by the content from the past. It was also revealed to be possible that a portion of the blame for the difficulties experienced with the materials from the past could be the result of the day to day decisions made by this one particular classroom teacher. The time and dedication to the mastery of the content knowledge and procedural skills necessary to decipher political cartoons from the past may have been insufficient to the task at hand. Conclusions drawn from the information collected in these interviews focus on decreasing the discrepancy between the two forms of visual material by taking steps that include considerable work on the part of the teacher and student to improve upon the background content knowledge and processing skills necessary to consistently decipher the information contained within the political cartoons. Such steps may prove to be impractical given the nature of the already jam-packed curriculums and time-strapped teachers that populate today's Social Studies classrooms. Additional studies would be necessary to determine if the experiences viewed here are common to those encountered in other parts of the nation or if they are indeed uniquely characteristic of this one situation. Accordingly, the results of those additional studies would possibly initiate a reevaluation of the conclusions drawn here.

This dissertation begins with the observation that discursive and visual representations of women in politics have direct consequences on the actual participation of women in politics (Beail & Goren, 2009; Bimey, 2010). For this reason I analyze current visual representations of female politicians in editorial cartoons. This work focuses on political cartoons because these artifacts provide information about cultural assumptions regarding gender roles and can bring insight about the cultural barriers that women still face when they become political actors. For this project I asked the following questions: How are female politicians represented visually? And how does the existing visual rhetoric enable, debilitate or restrain their political participation? This is also a comparative study of political cartoons that portray women in Mexico and the United States. To answer these questions, I analyze cartoons within a feminist framework, using literature on patriarchy, postfeminism, and the notion of the double binds faced by women in power. To examine portrayals of female politicians I developed a methodological approach that consists in identifying cartoons that rely on gender in order to construct their political commentary. Gendered cartoons are then classified using archetypes —specifically the Great Mother archetype— and stereotypes. For the analysis, I connect Kenneth Burke’s notion of perspective by incongruity with the feminist framework I previously constructed. The cartoons analyzed in this project comprise one decade, from 2002 to 2012, and four newspapers: La Jornada and Reforma (from Mexico), and The New York Times and The Washington Post (from the U.S.). I conclude that the argument that a patriarchal system no longer exists is not valid when we analyze cartoons that clearly resent women’s participation in the public political sphere. In these gendered cartoons women continue to be the symbol of the private sphere of the home. Their presence in the political space is portrayed as incongruous and cartoonists seek to restore the patriarchal order by visually taking women back to their traditional domestic space, depicting them as housewives and mothers. In these instances cartoons become powerful tools for reinforcing the traditional hierarchy of the private and public spheres. / text

無 / Walls provide not only physical but also ideological boundaries between neighbors. They can be seen as a symbol of protection or segregation. Using as stimulus the security fence between Mexico and the United States, this study aims to identify the main frames in American and Mexican political cartoons to decode the different messages and symbolism towards the border wall through which one can understand the U.S.-Mexico border issue as seen in the newspapers from the two countries. Using a qualitative analysis, the thesis studies 34 American and 69 Mexican cartoons from dailies that are representative of the press in the two countries. The cartoons evidence the use of six frames and symbolism: Death of migrants and the renegotiation of NAFTA were exclusively used by the Mexican papers. The freedom issue and the divisive nature of the wall balanced in both countries’ cartoons and the main preoccupations of the United States cartoons concerned the country’s double standard of hiring illegal migrant laborers while at the same rejecting an immigration agreement with Mexico. This study’s original contribution serves as a small step in the long road of empirical database expansion in framing political cartoons and the symbolism behind the portrayal of barriers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Political Science, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

No description available.

No description available.

Teachers in the 21st century are confronted with students who are mass consumers of visual texts via social apps on smart devices, media on television, and information in textbooks. Teaching students to analyze and question visual texts may help them construct meaning and critique what they see. Yet, very little is known about teachers’ pedagogical decisions when planning and teaching with visual texts. This study attempted to fill that gap. The purpose of this study was to explore how eighth grade history teachers utilize historical visual texts in their classrooms. Three eighth grade history teachers participated in this study. Data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews, teacher analyses of visual texts, video recorded lessons, and teacher reflections. Data obtained in this study addressed the following questions: How do teachers analyze a historical visual text for use in the classroom? What previous experiences do teachers utilize when planning to teach with a historical visual text? What do teachers’ reflections of a video recorded lesson reveal about the teachers’ instructional experiences with historical visual texts? What do video analyses of teachers utilizing historical visual texts reveal about teachers’ historical thinking and visual literacy pedagogical decisions? The results of this study indicated that the participants lack formal pedagogical content knowledge and prior experiences in teaching with historical visual texts. Yet, the participants reported that their lessons in this study were engaging and meaningful for students. Findings from this study suggest that historical visual texts can be effective in the teaching and learning of history.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Kathleen Burnett, Florida State University, School of Information Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 3, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation is a historical- anthropological account of political cartooning in colonial and postcolonial India. Through a focus on representational politics and biography I have situated the history and practice of cartooning in India to unfold the link between politics, the making of a moral aesthetic and modernity. I am attentive to the shifts in this link by tracing the movement in three historical phases: colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial. These three interconnected parts of my dissertation span a period from the 1870s when vernacular versions of the British Punch began to be produced in colonial India and contemporary neo- liberal India that is seeing a profusion of pocket cartoons in local newspaper editions. In organizing the narrative in three political frameworks - the colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial I discuss the circuits of global interconnectedness through which a shifting moral aesthetic of the cartoon came to be formulated at different times and places in Indian politics. As an everyday cultural production, a focus on the cartoon in terms of "what the cultural consumer makes" as "a production of poiesis - but a hidden one" (de Certeau 1984) illuminates the liminal (Turner) dimension of the cartoon. Additionally, by situating the cartoon as a discursive site (Terdiman 1985) I want to draw attention to new analytical spaces it generates for the discussion and construction of democracy, secularism, minority rights and the modern state. In order to grasp the generative and interpretive dimension of the cartoon I point to three concepts: liminal form, moral aesthetic, and tactical modernity. These concepts open a space to think through the hegemonic processes that come into play at the cultural site of the cartoon and enable and analysis of the cartoon as a site generative of hegemonic processes. This attention to the cartoon as a discursive site in the public sphere highlights the transformative circuit from laughter to debate, from visual to written, and a moral aesthetic that gets switched on through the interpretive dilemmas and representational practices of the cartoon. / text

DESCRIPTION: The research is divided into five chapters (plus an introduction and a conclusion) as follows: INTRODUCTION, in which the work is introduced, the problem is identified, and the need for the research. is presented. CHAPTER ONE: The image of the Arab in the West (from the old sources up to the present time). CHAPTER TWO: The Arab view of the West, The development and the changing approach in viewing the World from pre- Islamic Arabia including the contemporary schools of thought in the Arab world. CHAPTER THREE: Political cartoons as a medium of communication, their influence and role in opinion changing and image making. CHAPTER FOUR: UK-Based Arab Owned Mass Media. A survey of the newspapers and the magazines published in the United Kingdom and owned by Arab personalities, companies, governments and political parties. That includes the 38 daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly publications. This chapter studies the attitudes and presentations of the Arab media in a definite period of time, in regard to the West. (from Dec. 1987 till March 1991) CHAPTER FIVE : The Case Study. The image of the West in the Arab-owned press through political cartoons (four London-based daily newspapers). The findings of the field work, categorising and analysing the main features and elements of the image. CONCLUSION: Room for Improvement. Recommendations for better understanding, presentation and improvement in the Arab-West International relations and presentations. The major, original, part of the thesis has been devoted to surveying the Britain-based Arab press, as well as an analysis of the coverage of some of these papers and magazines of the West, using the political cartoon as indicators of the public perceptions of the West. The research also makes an attempt to trace the main outline of the historical development of perceptions of the West in the Arab mind. Appendices; Appendix(A): Arab Political Cartoonists. Appendix(B): Cartoons of Arabs in the Western Media. Appendix(C); Cartoons of the West in the Arab Media. Bibliography