Week 6 Read & React

Working on this course, Artistic thinking: Multimedia Applications for Teaching Art, I have become aware of importance of technologies in terms of teaching visual arts in 21st century. Especially though a few technology bootcamps in this course, I could learn various fascinating technologies which could certainly enable art curriculum to be more creative, brilliant and effective. I think I could say for sure that as art teachers, we are pretty lucky to have various technologies for teaching and learning arts.

Influenced by recent experiences with technologies, I have a better understanding about this week’s assigned reading, Duncum’s 7 principles for Visual Culture Education. That is because the 21st century technologies which put emphasis on visual culture images could efficiently and successfully fulfill Duncum’s 7 principles which derived from the literature of visual culture and are for contemporary art currilcum.

My favorite technologies I dealt with for this week’s assignment are Printerest and Popplet. These programs gave me great impression because they definitely provide efficient and practical tools for me to artistically think and research visual arts. While collecting inspirational images by using Printerest, I was convinced that this technology would be very beneficial especially when I am tied up in knots because of a lack of ideas and resources for making my own artwork or creating art lessons. Through being inspired by various images, I could not only develop ideas but also make connections with new concepts. It could also drag me to creative thinking process. Dealing with the programs, Inspiration, Popplet which could be used for creating intertext, I grasped the meaning and importance of intertextuality Duncum points out. 


With computures, intertectuality is known as hypertext, where pressing on blue works, and often on pictures, immediately takes the user to a related screen. With intertexts, images are connected irrespective of historical categories like high and low, past and present, and importantly, they connect student interest and knowledge with teacher requirements in a way that is limited only by time and imagination. Intertexts provide opportunities to explore power, ideology, representation, and the gaze. They also involve multimodality. (Duncum)

As Duncum emphasized, intertexuality could get all the other principles together, the programs such as Inspiration, Popplet could be effective tools used for teaching visual arts and visual culture in art classroom. Besides, since these technologies are easy for iGeneration students to operate on the Internet, students would be actively engaged and interested in this learning process. With these programs, students could not only explore visual culture but also understand how Duncum’s seven principles work in the visual world.

We need principles for contemporary curriculum. Those offered here are intended only as starting points. Other organizing principles, drawn from the literature of Visual Culture Studies referenced earlier, might include agency, audience, discourse, globalization, high and low culture, identity, myth, rhetoric, scopic regime, semiotics, and visuality.
Whatever we start, it is past time that we address imagery-past and present, fine and popular-using contemporary lenses that apply to the extraordinary plethora of images that now form a large part of our daily life. (Duncum)