Reflection #4

In the chapter5, demonstrating why teaching visual culture is important today and how beneficial it would be to young students, Freedman asserts that visual culture needs to be widely applied to the school curriculum. This chapter was especially advantageous for me because I could think deeply about how I could deal with visual culture in the classroom as an essential concept of today art education.

I agree with her that our world seems to be increasingly saturated by visual culture that influences students at all educational level. As a mother, I was very empathetic by her examples that even preschooler could recognize enormous images of popular visual culture. From my experience, that is really true. My four years old daughter has started to notice everything around her such as particular advertisements, symbols, logos, brands, music, movies and games and begun to make meaning by mixing those. This is pretty surprising to me because I didn’t teach many of them. It seems like the specific filter of visual culture works on the process of cognition of our children.  

I used to believe that where I could efficiently learn arts would be museum or art galleries as many people do. But influenced by learning visual culture, my perspective has been totally changed. There must be something important that cannot be taught in those places. I believe even though students have a good understating about particular works of art or art history, the students would not understand an aspect of whole culture and cultural interactions if they don’t have ability to extend meaning or make multiple meaning through cultural context. In terms of that, new concepts of arts are crossing many types of old boundaries. It could be a bit wide and vast but it could help young students to develop knowledge to make intelligent decisions about what they encounter and see and the ways where visual culture will influence them.

Developing ideas while reading this chapter, I came up with the idea that teaching visual culture would be strongly related to visual literacy. Unlike today’s high rates of literacy, there are so many people who can’t not read and interpret visual images successfully because current education doesn’t provide students a chance to develop visual literacy skill as well as to learn visual culture. Thinking about the relationship between visual culture and visual literacy, I identified that if the visual culture was enormous source or information, having visual literacy skill would be the purpose of learning visual culture because visual literacy mean that the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Without having a good understanding about visual culture, nobody can have a good visual literacy since it is almost impossible for viewers to understand complex images without extending meaning by using knowledge of visual culture.   

Art education should help students reflect on the seductive power of visual culture so that they become aware of the continual learning that is part of their daily contact with it. Students can become conscious of the ways in which they construct their own knowledge through their encounters with forms of visual culture. (Freedman)

Eisner demonstrates how children’s cognitive development takes place in the artmaking process in the chapter 5. Giving various examples and introducing many theories, he explained how artmaking process contributes to children’s cognitive developments. I was very impressed by his demonstration and got a chance to make a connection with the importance of learning visual culture.

Social norms, models for behavior, opportunities to converse and share one’s work with others are also opportunities to learn. This broad social conception of the sources of what, where, and how children learn, not only in the arts but in all areas, is referred to as situated learning; the child is situated in a social and material context and this context viewed as a culture. (Eisner)

Before making the unit plan during the last overview class, I didn’t know how many concepts and considerations would be associated and get together in the process prior to artmaking. I simply thought that art lessons might be less complicated and conceptual but it was completely wrong. Realizing how hard to create art lessons, I am, now, convinced that students can get various benefits from well-designed artmaking. Since good art lessons require higher level of thinking, students can definitely develop not only creativity or imagination but also cognitive skill through the whole process.

Interested in seeing children’s drawing as examples of cognitive development, I was able to fully aware that techniques required when making arts also reflect ways of thinking about the thing to be done. I actually haven’t thought of that before but thinking about the children who I observe during the internship, I couldn’t help but totally agree with it. Needless to say, through investigating new techniques, students might develop creativity and thinking skills. I think I could answer now if I was asked why acquisition of techniques would be important in art education.    

The acquisition of the technique is not merely a technical achievement. It is a mode of thought; and as such the changing feature in children’s artwork is the result of changes in the way in which they think about what they are doing. What we see in children’s artwork, particularly when it is laid out over time, is the progression of the development of such thinking. (Eisner)