IVLA 2026 Charleston: Full Schedule

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9:00am EDT

From Research to Empathy and Back Again: Reconstructing an Assignment to Improve Student Outcomes

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:00am - 9:30am EDT

This presentation reports on the third year of collaboration between an art librarian and a health sciences librarian for an acting for medical simulation course module that prompts students to empathize with patients facing bias while considering how images convey complex meanings. Two changes were made to the assignment: the professors limited the patient’s medical issue to pain and the final product was changed from a visual bibliography to a collage.
As in previous iterations, students rewrote a standardized case template to empathetically reflect on the biases encountered by patients with less power in the healthcare system based on their intersectionality. To increase the focus on the patient’s intersectionality, this time, the medical issue was limited to pain.
Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), an evidence-based method that promotes slow looking, improves diagnostic reasoning, and fosters practitioners’ empathy by enabling learners to surface and challenge assumptions was again incorporated into the lesson. However, visual annotated bibliographies were replaced by collages. This not only clarified expectations, it allowed students to creatively explore visual language through a familiar and unintimidating medium. Images were selected and arranged to communicate the social and cultural identity and pain experience of their fictional patients and reflected on how formal visual elements convey meaning.
This presentation will cover the rationale for the revisions made to the assignment, three-part lesson plan, learning outcomes, and practical best practices. Student examples will demonstrate how combining collage-based visual literacy with empathetic case rewrites focused on pain produces a richer understanding of patient experience. Attendees will learn how an interdisciplinary team of librarians and faculty have collaboratively designed and iteratively refined an assignment in enough detail that they could adapt it to their own cross-disciplinary work.

Speakers

Stefanie Hilles

Arts and Humanities Librarian, Miami University

Stefanie Hilles is the Arts and Humanities Librarian at Wertz Art and Architecture Library at Miami University where she liaises to the art, architecture and interior design, and theatre departments. Her instruction practice aims to embed information literacy into the creative processes... Read More →

Megan Jaskowiak

Health and Social Sciences Librarian, Miami University

Megan Jaskowiak Health and Social Sciences Librarian. She liaises with Criminology, Gerontology, Psychology, Sociology, Speech Pathology and Audiology, Family Science and Social Work, and the Physician Associate Studies program. She has a Masters of Library and Information Science... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:00am - 9:30am EDT
Circular Church

Paper

9:30am EDT

Curating with Care: Visual Text Selection as a Culturally Responsive Literacy Practice

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:30am - 10:00am EDT

Circular Church

What does it mean to choose a book for a group of students you are still learning to know? This presentation examines text selection as a visual literacy practice, one that requires educators to read images, illustrations, and visual narratives not only for aesthetic quality but for whose identities, experiences, and ways of knowing they center or erase. Drawing on work with the Literacy Community Initiative (LCI) at NC State University, a program serving immigrant and refugee youth, we share a framework for curating picturebooks and mentor texts with intention and equity at the forefront. The framework integrates six criteria including mirrors, windows, and doors (Bishop, 1990); authorship and illustrator diversity; trauma-informed resonance (Dutro, 2019); linguistic and cultural affirmation; community alignment; and pedagogical fit, grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014) and positive youth development (Lee, Picart & Mann, 2025).
We argue that text selection is never neutral. The images we bring into a learning space communicate to students who belongs in the story and, by extension, who belongs in the room. This session invites participants to examine their own text selection practices and consider how visual curation can become an act of care, community-building, and justice.

Speakers

Amber Moore

Doctoral student, North Carolina State University

Amber L. Moore is a doctoral candidate in Teacher Education and Learning Sciences, with a concentration in Literacy and English Language Arts, at North Carolina State University. Her research sits at the intersection of visual methodologies, embodied literacies, and alternative literacy... Read More →

Haleema Khalil

Doctoral Candidate, North Carolina State University

Haleema Khalil is a doctoral candidate in Teacher Education and Learning Sciences at North Carolina State University, where she is advised by Dr. Jackie Relyea. She holds a master's degree from Vanderbilt University and brings a transnational perspective to her scholarship, having... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:30am - 10:00am EDT
Circular Church

Paper

10:30am EDT

Memory as Compost: Food as Visual Material for MESI Sense-Making

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:30am - 11:00am EDT

Circular Church

Memory is often treated as archival—stable, stored, and retrievable (Schacter, 1996). This paper challenges that assumption by engaging memory through the metaphor of compost: a generative process in which fragments of lived experience decay, intermingle, and are reassembled into new meaning over time.
Drawing on Musically Enhanced Self-Inquiry (MESI), a multimodal, autoethnographic methodology that engages sound, visuals, and embodied reflection (Ramirez, 2024), three scholars in thought partnership (Akogeryam & Ramirez, 2026) explore how everyday objects—specifically food as visual and sensory material—become sites through which memory, place, and representation emerge and are reconfigured.
Through three reflexive memos centered on distinct food objects, we demonstrate how sensory engagement (taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound) surfaces layered, shifting memories rather than fixed recollections. These memos, analyzed through visual reflection, storytelling, metaphor, and arts-based practices, function as compost materials: everyday artifacts that, when engaged through MESI, generate complex intersections of identity, culture, labor, migration, and belonging.
Across these cases, we show how food operates not merely as sustenance but as visual and sensory material through which dominant assumptions of authenticity, family, and representation—often embedded in material and visual culture—are destabilized and reinterpreted through lived experience. In this way, memory is not retrieved but emerges as a fluid, relational, and constructed process.
We argue that MESI offers a framework for engaging the “messy” processes of sense-making, where multimodal and sensory engagement opens new reflexive possibilities. By positioning food as visual material, this work expands visual literacy to include how we engage visual phenomena through our senses as critical sites of analysis.
This paper invites visual literacy scholars to reconsider memory as compost, opening new possibilities for multimodal inquiry, critical reflection, and meaning-making. In this space, MESIness offers room for reflection, healing, and the naming of lived experiences as we process and embody authenticity, performance, and belonging.

Speakers

Emmanuel Anyetei Kojo Akogyeram

Doctoral Student, North Carolina State University

Emmanuel Anyetei Kojo Akogyeram is a doctoral student in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development, with a concentration in higher education opportunity, equity, and justice, and a student affairs professional in higher education. Originally from Ghana, Emmanuel brings... Read More →

Naomi Ramirez

Lecturer, San Diego State University

Dr. Naomi Ramirez teaches at multiple colleges, where she uses a critical multimodal lens to challenge Eurocentric ways of knowing and create more humanizing, inclusive learning spaces. She holds a PhD in Education from San Diego State University and Claremont Graduate University... Read More →

Kaylen Alexandra

MFA student, Lindenwood University

Kaylen Alexandra is a Master of Fine Arts student at Lindenwood University studying creative writing. Her interests include researching a variety of ways to practice emotional intelligence and leveraging creativity as a tool for healing. Her Substack publication, The Fifth Pillar... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:30am - 11:00am EDT
Circular Church

Paper