Promoting preservice teachers' meta-representational (visual) competencies: The need for a new pedagogy

The chapter discusses my response to the urgent need for a pedagogy that would effectively promote Israeli teachers' meta-representational and particularly Visual Representational competencies in order to prepare new generations of school students to fully and successfully navigate the diverse, rich multimodal information that they encounter in the postmodern visual world. Currently, although VRs widely permeate school curricula, learners' mass media sources for information gathering, and even matriculation testing, students' meta-representational competence (MRC) are not intentionally developed to enable their dealing with visually transmitted information and their mindful manipulation of it for achieving their goals. VRs usages have been shown to be superficial, implicit, inadequate to utilize VRs' potential for promoting knowledge acquisition and understanding, and even frequently erroneous. Following a short discussion of the constructs of Meta-Visual Representational Competencies and pedagogy, and potential institutional obstacles for introducing VRs, I propose core pedagogical guidelines for promoting such competencies in teachers, based on evidence collected continually over a decade of work with teachers at Haifa, Israel, while designing, developing, and refining this pedagogy in preservice teacher training and other programs at the University of Haifa and inservice frameworks. Each guideline is operationalized into tasks and activities designed for achieving its specific purpose, focusing on the application of these suggested guidelines in preservice teacher development program. The MRC-promoting pedagogy was designed and developed while keeping in mind the notion that a pedagogy should be flexible, adaptable to different instructional styles, goals, and contexts, and based on guidelines that are operationalized into detailed instructional plans for achieving specific goals, in accordance with teachers' preferences.