Hear from Agriculture Prof. Mike Kaller

Transcript

So one of the things that I do in a more informal setting to reinforce these communication ideas is to show them pictures. So a lot of the imagery associated with natural resource research, whether it be while like fish for us wetlands is an association with hunting and fishing, so what I'll do in several class instances is show them images, maybe an image of three individuals in the mountains, with the animals, they recently harvested and I'll ask them to create narrative--What is there? What's the story going on here? What is the story that they're receiving? And then I'll contrast that with what the purpose of the photo was--Why was that photo taken? What was their message that they were trying to convey to the audience? And we'll discuss where those mismatches occurred. And then we'll talk about how that image could be improved. You know, I'll make some suggestions to get the conversation started, but really it's really quick before they begin to say: well, maybe you could do this or maybe you could show that, maybe you could pose the animals in a more lively way, even though they are harvested animals. So the students have told us a lot to say about that picture and it gets them thinking about their messaging and how they choose to show images about what they care about and what they do in intentional or unintentional messaging associate with images. Pictures do to tell 1,000 words you know and getting those discussions about the pictures gets them thinking about their own choice of images and visuals when they do their assignments.