ABSTRACT
When I sat down last summer to plan an upcoming course in visual communication,
I felt a sense of uncertainty about my approach. Although I believe passionately in
students’ need to develop comfort and competence in their abilities to apply
principles of design and rhetoric to their texts, I still struggled with how to balance
theory with an emphasis on the software tools necessary to implement it. As I
constructed my syllabus and reflected on past successes and challenges in the course,
I worked through a number of considerations, but five variables in particular were
critical. Careful attention to the following allowed me to build an approach appropriate
to this context:
• course focus
• student population
• professional preparation needs
• access to technological resources
• programmatic/institutional setting
My resulting syllabus satisfied my disciplinary commitments, as well as appearing
to meet students’ educational and professional needs. This chapter uses these five
variables as a framework for developing a localized, technologically appropriate
pedagogy for visual communication instruction.
