Jaclyn Gallegos

Art 133
September 22, 2016
Unit Paper 2

A young female student sees a picture of a Victorias Secret model on a cover of a

magazine. Now, the female students thinks that this is how she should look when she becomes
that age. Because students are so involved in visual media, including magazines, billboards,
shopping malls, and amusement parks, and because the images projected for their consumption
can be so influential, art educators have recognized responsibility to educate students regarding
the contemporary visual world in which they live. (Al Hurwitz and Michael Day, 2007, p.77)
Visual culture is defined in many ways, one of them being that it is all that is humanly formed
and sensed through vision. (Hurwitz and Day, p.76) These visual arts have power over how our
students see and interpret things in our society today. Its especially important for educators to
take the responsibility to teach our students how to analyze these visuals in a more appropriate
way. However, according to art educator Sheng Kuan Chung, visual culture today can be used to
our advantage. A cigarette ad, for example, may make smoking look cool, but Chung uses the
power of this ad as a lesson learned and the students redesigned the ad to have a negative
connotation and denotation.
In my own classroom, I would like to use the Spiral Workshop approach as demonstrated
on page 55 of the text. Its not enough to have a unit on lines but to give the students a chance to
recognize the cultural choices that underlie even the most mundane moments and actions of
everyday life... (Olivia Gude, 2004, p.55) I would mostly prefer to use it in a historical context.
If we are doing a unit on the Martin Luther King, I would like to use the essential question Who
has privilege and why? I would like to show pictures from this time and talk about how this has
affected our lives today. We would do an art investigation or VTS so my students can
demonstrate an understanding of power.

Jaclyn Gallegos
Art 133
September 22, 2016
Unit Paper 2

Gude, O. (2016). Postmodern Principles. In A. Ward (Comp.), Art 133 Elementary

School Art Education
(pp. 53-61). XanEdu. (Original work published 2004)

Hurwitz, A., & Day, M. (2016). Children and their Art. In A. Ward (Comp.), Art 133
Elementary School
Art Education (pp. 73-90). XanEdu. (Original work published 2007)