73. Nurturing Information Literacy and Visual Literacy Amongst Design Students Using Constructivist Approach

Industry 4.0 has paved way for transformation in the traditional methods of teaching and learning in higher education. Todays information age has minimised the need for information dissemination and knowledge transfer in a classroom and has rather intensified the need to equip students with information literacy (IL) skills. IL skills include ability to identify and evaluate relevant content from rampantly available content online and analyse it to make meaning and create knowledge. This paper examines a visual literacy (VL) inquiry-based capsule for learning history of art and design, where first year design students of under graduation course in an art and design institute in India, engaged with different works of art from across time and space. With the pedagogical content knowledge, a Constructivist approached was applied, borrowing from the Vygotsky’s ‘mastery learning criterion’ defined in his concept of zone of proximal development (ZPD), and Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle. Based on the analysis of the primary data collected from four consecutive batches of 2018–22 to 2021–25, who undertook the capsule, it is proposed that subject specific CPAT is instrumental in nurturing IL skills which helps in fostering VL and makes a student an independent lifelong learner. The findings also reveal that the students have been able to apply their acquired ability of using the tool to engage at various levels of inquiry critically and analytically in different design specific contexts evidencing the developed VL and IL skills.