The Composition Department at SUNY New Paltz is embracing the Chancellor’s call for Innovation and Entrepreneurship by moving from theme-based courses to ones driven by Wicked Problems (problems difficult to address because so many contingent factors are in a state of flux). This shift requires refocusing critical thinking skills to help students see and analyze problems under investigation from multiple perspectives. My pedagogical focus is on wicked problems concerning the effects of visual rhetoric at work in our culture. To help students make the mental leaps and bounds necessary for tackling cultural problems of this nature I have integrated Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) into the classroom to stimulate dialogic processes and critical inquiry. This workshop is designed to show how VTS works, and how it can be applied in a classroom environment.

In this workshop, participants are cast into the role of Image Detective to explore connections between a series of royal portraits across several centuries. These connections follow themes of authority/authorship, symbolism, propaganda, and compositional/contextual analysis: building blocks of rhetorical analysis that drive critical visual thinking. Following this VTS journey, participants are invited to discuss how this approach can be modified to suit their own pedagogical praxis.