Tamara Duran

Amber Ward

September 21, 2016

Art 133

Unit 2 Paper

Visual culture has gradually had more and more of an impact as different sorts of

media join the art world. Though visual culture doesnt have a specific definition, its

actually a rather broad subject. In Children and Their Art by Al Hurwitz and Michael

Day (2007) they give three definitions that scholars gave about visual culture. One was

that all that is humanly formed and sensed through vision, second is visual culture is

concerned with visual elements in which information, meaning, or pleasure is sought by

the consumer in an interface with technology, and last is that it is the study of all social

practices of visuality. Visual culture has grown so much that it is just easily accessible;

with visual culture being so accessible educators feel responsible to teach students about

the contemporary world. There are a few different ways to teach visual culture in art

education; three ways are through radical change, applied art, and comprehensive art

education. Radical change is more focused on solely teaching visual culture and its

primary goal is social reconstruction that promotes democracy, liberty, and justice

(Hurwitz & Day, 2007, p. 80), where as with applied art its focuses on various forms

with an emphasis on art making (Hurwitz & Day, 2007, p.80). Lastly there is

comprehensive art education which teaches visual culture by still recognizing the four art

disciplines while having visual culture as one component in the art curriculum.
 From the different ways to teach visual culture I would want to use comprehensive

art education in how I teach in a classroom setting. It seems more open; it teaches

multiple forms of art and not just on one specific thing. Now as to how I might apply this

in a classroom setting I would looks at the popular things in visual culture that would be

relevant to different things in the art world. After that I would want to discuss with my

class about the piece from visual culture and see what they notice about it, how it applies

to what were leaning, if they see the art disciplines in the piece, etc. Following that I

would possibly want them to compare it to art types/pieces of art before working on a

project related to visual culture. Visual culture is all around them so I would want to make

them aware of its influence while also making them aware about the influence of other

types of art.

References

Hurwitz, Al. Day, Michael. Children and Their Art: Methods for the Elementary School.

Text.