A Slow Approach to Visual Literacy in Higher Education

Recipient of the 2025 ARLIS/NA Worldwide Book Award for Publications

The principles of “slow librarianship”―which prioritizes reflection, collaboration, solidarity, and valuing all kinds of contributions―can also support deeper and more sustained learning and understanding. This book emphasizes the importance of attention and focus to the process of visual literacy, demonstrating how this approach supports ACRL’s Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education and the Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education. Library workers, educators, and instructors will discover

• dozens of flexible lesson plans for teaching visual literacy, scaffolded by competency levels: novice, intermediate, and advanced;
• ways to integrate slow looking into the classroom, emphasizing careful observation and the sustained act of looking;
• techniques for showing learners how to select images with intention, as well as carefully determine when and how to share those images;
• reasons why slow creating is essential to understanding and applying visual literacy in the twenty-first century; and
• a look at how increasing access to internet connectivity, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and new ethics for sharing and using information online will affect the future of visual literacy.

Dana Statton Thompson is a research and instruction librarian at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. In this capacity, she supports the teaching, learning, and research of students and faculty within the Arthur J. Bauernfeind College of Business. Dana holds an MLIS, an MA in art history, an MFA in studio art from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a BA in journalism and studio art from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

Stephanie Beene is an associate professor and art, architecture, and planning librarian at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she supports the Art Department within the College of Fine Arts and the entire School of Architecture and Planning. Stephanie received an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA in art history from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA in art and art history from Colorado State University.