COMM 240 - Visual Communication and Culture

Units: 4
Students will become critical readers of visual images by employing a variety of communication-based theoretical frameworks and analytical approaches (e.g. semiotics, rhetoric) to visual artifacts, texts and acts. Explore how visual images persuade. Students will select examples of visual rhetoric to analyze, which culminates in an essay and creative project of their choosing.

Possible Instructional Methods: Entirely On-ground.
Grading: A-F or CR/NC (student choice).
Course Typically Offered: Fall & Spring

Student Learning Outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:

Analyze, interpret, and describe visual communication circulating in the public sphere through a communication-based theoretical lens;
Understand and apply a variety of frameworks of rhetorical criticism, an intellectual practice dating back to the classical Greeks;
Effectively perform and present rhetorical analysis of historical and contemporary forms/modes of visual communication with the goal of making arguments to effectively persuade an audience.