Vol. 23 (2020) 21 THE USES OF VISUAL CULTURE IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION Mara Lucía Ciaffoni, León Emanuel Ávalos and Enrique Alejandro Basabe Images have become ubiquitous. Therefore, teaching visual culture needs to be integrated to English language teaching (ELT). As a result, opportunities for its study and experience seem to be emerging in English language teacher education (ELTE) programmes in Argentina. Here, an attempt in that vein is reported through the description and assessment of a series of activities carried out by the teacher educator in charge of the course on contemporary literature at the ELTE programme at the National University of La Pampa (UNLPam). The results are aimed at encouraging a further sharing of teaching experiences and more systematic research in the field. Conceptual Framework In its attempts at reliving art as experience, this work must be inscribed in the Deweyan (1994) tradition. John Dewey (1994), the American philosopher and educator, urged teachers “to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are the works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience” (205). Nowadays, it must be acknowledged, though, that it is not precisely literature that constitutes the central artistic experience in most people’s lives. Visual culture has taken that role, and human cultural experience, once tightly tied to the written word, has become visual (Mirzoeff 2015). Film and TV series turn out to be the most popular ways of consuming narratives, and, through social networking, photography is by far the most popular way of storytelling. Also inspired by Dewey (1994), Argentina Arts teacher educator Gabriela Augustowsky (2012) hailed art as “a powerful didactic device capable of configuring even a resistant space against the flood of advertising images” (32). Even though both Dewey (1994) and Augustowsky (2012) highlighted the need for visual culture to be necessarily related to experience, both implicitly emphasize the key role of teaching in tying everyday reality to a valuable visual culture and an artistic expression. In her early work, Augustowsky (2005) claimed that classroom walls constituted the central aesthetic space at schools but warned against the excessive power exerted by teachers in the decisions taken about the visual production displayed on them, a warning also issued by Pratt (2017) for artists’ school projects in ELT. Augustowsky’s (2012, 2016, 2017) more recent work established strong grounds for the development of art in teaching children. There is a powerful call to teach how to experience visual culture or, perhaps even better, how to use different “reading” strategies in order to develop abilities that go beyond mere comprehension into forms of reflective interpretation (Augustowsky 2012). This entails furthering the knowledge and the aesthetic enjoyment of visual culture and, in due course, offering the students chances of active production and collaborative creation. Classroom experiences in that vein are thoroughly described in Augustowsky’s (2012, 2017) last two volumes, and they became her pedagogy of creation, one that activates both the students’ rational capacities and their emotional perceptions as well. Last, Augustowsky (2017) asserts that “not only children must be offered audiovisual education but it is the teachers’ own artistic production and experimentation that should be promoted in the hope that they result in rich and creative teaching practices” (164). The publication of The Image in English Language Teaching (Donaghy & Xerri 2017) decidedly set the basis for an integration of visual culture to ELT. In that volume, Zakime (2017), for instance, proposed the development of visual literacy, Clare (2017) advocated for the use of film, and Wasilewska (2017) potently reflected on teaching English to a visual generation. The power of using images lies, in sum, in their ability to trigger stories in the minds of the students and create a need and a desire to communicate – the ultimate goal of ELT. Similarly, in the local context, our research team has already reported on experiences carried out in the context of ELTE. Through the collaborative creation of photo-stories, Basabe (2018b) demonstrated that working with narrative and photography provided prospective teachers with a framework to interpret human experience, an issue that is always at the core of the teaching enterprise. Finally, drawing on Baker (2015),