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Reading Plague Images: Visual Literacy In The History Classroom, Katherina Fostano

Developing Pedagogy Graduate Student Showcase

In 2016 Peter Felten, Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching and Learning at Elon University, wrote, “Our students live in a highly visual world, where images are fundamental in shaping their understandings of history before they ever enter our classrooms.” This observation prompted me to create a series of exercises that introduce students to general visual literacy skills in the History classroom. These exercises aim to help students use visual sources to make evidence-based interpretations of the past with rigor and efficacy. In this presentation, I focused on images of past plagues since the recent proliferation of plague-related …