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VISUAL STIMULI IN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: PHENOMENOLOGY OF EDUCATIONAL EVENT // Pedagogical Review. 2018. Issue 1 (19). P. 23-33

The article presents the results of the research conducted by the author in Tomsk State University (Russia). The work draws upon the concept of the Iconic Turn and its potential for educational communication development. Contemporary education has to be sensitive to Iconic Turn consequences and to modify its educational environment via means of visual mediation. Our research aims at deconstructing the existing system of background knowledge and convictions as the basis of self- and the word-around-us description. Such deconstruction which will result in more critical perception of the reality within and around an individual is to be conducted by ‘forced slowdown’ of behavioral automatic mechanisms created by traditional educational practices. The research is conducted within microethnographic approach which focuses upon ‘what is happening right here and right now’ in the space of inter-communication. The author conducted several educational events with the use of a visual stimulus as an agent of destructive educational mediation. The experiment outcomes provoke discussion about the gaps in educational communication emerging when visual stimulus is presented to student audience in a class. The article describes the experiment set in Tomsk State University at deconstructing the existing system of background knowledge and convictions as the basis of self- and the wordaround- us description. During the experiment the organizers carried out the ‘forced slowdown’ of nominative and interpretive processes. The aim of such strategy was to create a ‘conflict situation’ in which the gap between the stimulus itself and the pre-created perception of that stimulus has been observed. The research has resulted in two main conclusions. First, students face difficulties in expressing themselves in communication as they base their utterances on the logic of the textual mode while they deal with an artifact of the visual mode. Second, students’ communicative strategies depend not on the content of a visual stimulus but mostly on its ‘perception’. Thus, future advancement of the existing educational practices is tightly connected with the new visual mode implementation.

Keywords: iconic turn, visual stimulus, visual in education, phenomenological research in education, educational communication