Designing Visual Curriculum for Learning

Abstract

Traditional education is facing several major shortcomings today: large achievement gaps, inefficient one-size-fits-all approaches, and low student-to-teacher ratio. In addressing these problems which have resulted in poor learner outcomes, there is also a proliferation of proposed solutions to improve the quality of education. The purpose of this research is to introduce and explore a concept that I refer to as ‘visual curriculum’, which integrates prior research on engaging learners to form an emerging framework for learning design. In this paper, a visual curriculum is defined as a curriculum that helps learners achieve a learning goal by interacting with visual objects. Of course, most people already acknowledge that visual representations are essential for communicating ideas in education (Dwyer, 1967; McGrath et al., 2005). However, this paper explores how visuals in learning, along with other design principles, might form a framework to guide curriculum design processes. To demonstrate this concept, three real-life case studies that have been designed to test the concept of the visual curriculum are presented. Analyzing these three projects will illustrate the concept of visual curriculum in different content areas utilizing different mediums.