Melissa Anne Maccini

Professor A. Ward
Art Education 133
22 September 2016
Power

Students are surrounded by the power of visual media. Everywhere the students look they

are faced with the excessive overload of visuals attempting to take control of their thoughts and

change their voice and views. Students need to gain the perceptual and conceptual tools needed

to analyze meanings and motives of commercial imagery (Hurwitz & Day, 2007). Teachers

must provide the opportunity for the students to learn to break down or deconstruct what they are

viewing and interpret the intended message. Giving the student the power to think deeper about

the visual they are seeing allows them to develop confidence to choose whether the work

accurately reflects who they are. Barrett provided the example of contemporary artist Michael

Ray Charles whose paintings exposed the connotations of racism in advertising (Barrett, 2003.

P.1). Charles incorporated old southern African-American stereotypes like Aunt Jemima into

contemporary media to expose the denotations of African-American subjects. Hurwitz and Day

wrote about a possible paradigm shift needed in art education so that the terminology and the

pedagogy is more in line with the visual culture of todays students and classroom.

The adaption of the big idea of power could be brought to all students at the elementary

level through a lesson plan that allowed them the ability to take modifying an advertisement with

different pictures and words. For example, they could choose ads printed from different previous

decades and use current pictures from magazines to cut out and modify the looks of the people

are items in the ad. They could use visual thinking strategies (VTS) to determine the message of
the original advertisement and how they might facilitate change to reflect their culture. As part of

the project they could answer questions about the original advertisement and the one that they

created. For example, which ads are inclusive or exclusive to their peers?

References

Barrett, T. (2003). Interpreting visual culture. Art Education, 56(2), 6-12.

Hurwitz, A., & Day, M. (2007). Children and their art: Methods for the elementary school, (8th

ed.). Thompson Wadsworth.