Seeing what we mean: visual knowledge and critical epistemology

<div class="line" id="line-5"> As knowledge production, interpretation, and representation in educational settings rolls along Guttenberg&rsquo;s (text&hyphen;based) track, the twenty&hyphen;first&hyphen;century world outside the doors of the schools and universities is exploding with visual ways of knowing and being. As visual text is silenced in education, it is simultaneously exploited in the marketplace. This article will examine some of the political, epistemological, and ontological questions that are raised by education&rsquo;s steadfast adherence to the reductionism of &lsquo;text only&rsquo; in a richly multimodal/visual world. The author uses a short autoethnographic journey as a starting point to examine the connections between critical pedagogy and visual knowledge in the quest for an educational world that literally and figuratively sees more.</div>