by Jon Luckstead, Faculty Librarian/Professor, Library Services

My experience with the Global Education Faculty Learning Community was quite enriching. The guest speakers truly represented a broad array of subject matter expertise and perspectives from across the globe. They demonstrated various ways of bringing issues from other parts of the world into the classroom. I enjoyed the questions and answers and discussions that we had with the guest speakers as well. It was truly a privilege to be part of a community of faculty with diverse backgrounds, teaching a broad range of disciplines. Now, more than ever, our students need to have a global perspective. The Global Education FLC was an encouraging group for developing curricula to help bring about a more global perspective among students.

The kickoff meeting at the University of Texas was a great way to get both FLCs this past year started–the Global Gender and Women’s Studies FLC as well as the Global Education FLC. The participants got to know each other a bit and we enjoyed presentations from fellow ACC faculty about the curricula they developed as part of an FLC.

The guest speakers we had at our monthly meetings were phenomenal. I often found myself returning to a thought that occurs to me from time to time–that the number of people and communities in the world is so vast that even being acquainted with the tiniest fraction of them would be impossible. Although I am disheartened by the homogenizing influence of Hollywood and Western media on the rest of the world’s culture, this Faculty Learning Community brought to light examples of the rich diversity that still remains.

Activities and practices around the globe reveal some of the various ways that people think as well as adapt in the face of sociocultural as well as economic pressures that we will likely never encounter. Interestingly, our guest speakers often called upon online streaming video, a relatively recent technology, to demonstrate aspects of culture and developments, new and old, from around the world. One of my favorite speakers was Aruna Kharod from UT. She had us create rhythm patterns quite different from the rhythms I hear most often in Western music, which makes me think again about how differently other cultures may approach things like language, art, and music.

In our session with Chesa Caparas and Scott Lankford, we discussed the exploitation of overseas workers and decolonization. I was introduced to the “cli-fi” genre of climate fiction. I am currently Library Services’ bibliographer for Environmental Science and Technology as well as Conservation Management. Inspired by this discussion as well as later discussions involving environmental justice, such as the one we had with Michael Mosser of UT in the Spring, I was tempted to develop my FLC project around environmental concerns such as environmental racism around the world. Another guest speaker, Jovana Lazic Knezevic of Stanford, discussed the Eurocentrism pervading historical accounts and even the field of geography. For example, maps typically have Europe at their top or imply that Europe would be located above rather than below what is mapped. This framework emphasizes the apparent superiority of Europe. This visual bias in maps and globes helped lead me to my project involving visual literacy.

The Global Education FLC provided me with encouragement and feedback as I researched issues of visual literacy with respect to globalism. Graphics such as photographs and videos are pervasive and supposedly a means by which language and cultural barriers may be overcome. Over several centuries, painters developed the ability to create naturalistic two-dimensional representations of the world. But these visual artists had the liberty to make alterations as they painted that were not entirely congruent with the original subjects.

Photography was a medium that supposedly captured the world by means of a mechanical and chemical process that was unerring in its representation of its subject. What you saw is what you got. This would seem highly practical in communicating across cultures. My project raised numerous questions about this idea. Of course, as it turns out, photographers also had the liberty to manipulate their photographic compositions such that they could be misleading.

More important, in my view, is the issue of the relationship between graphics and verbal communication. Written text and other forms of verbal communication almost always accompany graphics or are even embedded in the graphics, to convey context to the viewer. Now we have both the graphic and verbal elements of such a cultural product that can leave us with many of the communication challenges that existed before photography. Would the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, for example, still have implications with respect to encoding and decoding this hybrid form of communication?

Graphics can dupe people into thinking that much has been communicated when, because of a lack of context and/or abstraction, they actually communicate very little of importance. Such “low information” graphics have become especially concerning considering their pervasiveness. Such media may, unfortunately, replace more enriching ones. Every minute viewing photos on a social media platform is a minute taken away from reading a book offering a highly developed explanation or interpretation of some aspect of the world. As much as graphics can be manipulated to misinform–and AI-generated images may amplify this–perhaps the greater concern should be that seemingly benign graphics are replacing more enriching content, resulting in significant opportunity costs. Rather than bringing about more cross-cultural understanding, for example, graphics could hinder it.

The Global Education FLC expanded my understanding of the means by which faculty can engage their students with global issues. It inspired me to pursue issues surrounding visual literacy and cultural understanding that I can bring to students during information literacy sessions. I am so grateful to all of the organizers and guest speakers, as well as my faculty colleagues, for making this Faculty Learning Community such a rewarding experience.