Isabella Gomez-Welsh

Full APA Citation:

Freedman, K. (2003). Teaching visual culture: Curriculum, aesthetics and the social life of art.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Khazaleh, L. (2007, March 12). Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of "stone age" and
"primitive".
https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2007/anthropologists_condemn_the_use_
of_terms.

Main Idea/Purpose:
Freedman (2003) establishes the origins of visual culture in chapter one. She does so from a
historical outlet with an emphasis on where the two intersect via modernism and post-modernism. She
integrates this into the major ways visual culture is implemented into the classroom as well as our daily lives.

Short Overview:

The chapter begins by identifying what visual culture is and how it is “inherently interdisciplinary
and increasingly multimodal”. (Freedman, 2003, p. 2). Because of how visual culture plays into every part of
our lives, it naturally becomes embedded into every area of academia . It is up to the art educator to properly
carve modes of understanding visual culture for students by firstly understanding its role in history.

Historically, “art is considered a metaphor for postmodernism, just as science is for modernism” (p.
12). As Freedman understands it, art is the method in which we maneuver through everything: from
curriculum to identity and everything in between. The line that defines each academic subject as well as
ourselves from others is blurred when visual culture comes into the picture, as it ties all these pieces together.
Art stands to break down the rigid, disinterested rationales modernism once established and, through art
education, can be further utilized to promote more intimate understandings and relationships to our world as
we know it.

Visual culture serves to open the conversation of what is and is not “fine art”, how these things are to
be defined, and deepens the artist and viewer’s role in the response and critique process. According to
Freedman:

An essential responsibility of education in the future will be to teach students about the power of imagery
and the freedoms and responsibilities that come with that power. If we want students to understand the
postmodern world in which they live, curriculum will have to include a greater focus on the impact of
visual forms of expression across traditional boundaries of teaching and learning.(p.20)

By bringing visual culture into the classroom, educators widen student’s schema and relationships to the
media that surrounds them, empowering them with a universal language at which to discuss larger issues.

Critical Response: Reflections and/or relevance to personal art educational

experiences/or teaching experience:

I understand this is aged material and was revolutionary of its time. However, if we are to continue
to view it as essential to our curriculum 18 years later, it is necessary to view it under the criticality we would
perceive any other student or published work.

The first thing that made me really reconsider the way this was written was Freedman’s (2003)
definition of visual culture. As she states, “It includes the fine arts, tribal arts, advertising, popular film and
video, folk art, television and other performance, housing and apparel design, computer games and toy
Isabella Gomez-Welsh

design, and other forms of visual production and communication” (p. 1). Here, Freedman gives a list of
artistic mediums, and then just so happens to slip entire continents, their entire history of art, huge time
periods, and generalizes it all into “tribal” and “folk”, even going as far as delineating them from “fine art”.
This is to say that what Westerners understand as “tribal” and “folk” do not already play a huge role in visual
culture as we know it, appropriation and whitewashing aside. There is a difference between bringing
something up and it being inclusive and bringing something up and it being harmful. Lorenz (2007) phrases
this discrepancy beautifully when he paraphrases the argument of many African scholars and says "anyone
concerned with truth and accuracy should avoid the term "tribe" in characterizing African ethnic groups or
cultures". Tribe has no coherent meaning, promotes a myth of primitive African timelessness, obscuring
history and change, and implies primitive savagery in the modern west” (2007). Freedman (2003), in
argument of this, goes on to say how not including a wide array of art is limiting to a student’s learning
grounds, but only after stating how a postmodernist art classroom “challenges underlying assumptions and
that which has been taken for granted” (p. 13). She goes on to permeate such underlying assumptions here
by grouping “tribal” and “folk” cultures as this ostracized thing we do not fully understand. I believe this is
but a small sample of a bigger issue in the artworld, especially concerning how and what teachers show in
their classroom. It makes lines of hers like “being an individual means something different for people of
different races, classes, and sexes” (p. 11) read very differently. This is because she, although unconsciously
done and with the best intention, further drives that nail into the painful lived differences of being a person of
color vs. a white individual in the West. By including “folk” and “tribal” art as part of visual culture in the way
she did and as a separate thing from fine art, she creates a skewed ‘diverse’ understanding of what “tribal”
and “folk” mean to white folk while stunting those very people of color in their efforts to establish an identity
within their classrooms. This does more harm than good if her intention was to be inclusive, because she is
insinuating anything that has people of color is its own lesser category entirely and is not part of computer
games, television, and all the other mediums listed.

Freedman (2003) has an interesting take on identity in the classroom. She states, “Education is a
process of identity formation because we change as we learn; our learning changes our subjective selves. The
creation of self is based on the subject being invested with certain characteristics through symbolic
representation” (p. 2). This struck a chord with me because our entire lives and in art education specifically,
we make projects that are supposed to display who we are by incorporating our identity and attempting to
define it under certain circumstances. I feel this is counterintuitive, especially at the middle school level
because adolescents, and even adults, are continuously developing their identity. On the flipside, the
standard approach to making art education projects interpretive and engaging is to make work about how we
already identify. As an adult that is still continuously puzzled by the idea of making an entire project on an
identity I do not have as down pat as the education system may believe students to be, I feel it is best to
challenge identity in the classroom rather than establish it. By doing so, students are actively learning about
themselves. That in itself forms a more solid identity, as all education should be built around students
learning about themselves and forming a continuously shifting identity around that, not expecting identity to
be a given and making art around that false sense of self. For example, Hansel’s lesson plan asks that students
make a surreal piece about things they fear. This demands a certain amount of introspection and challenging
one’s own set of beliefs. In this project, students use symbolic representation and visual culture in ways that
are against social and conscious norms. By making art through these abnormal guidelines, students’ better
channel the visuals and styles students they are truly more connected to vs. what they feel they should most
identify with. Therefore, Freedman’s point of identity being shaped through symbols becomes embedded
with more meaning, as these visuals and symbols are coming from the student’s subconscious and reflection
and not from what popular visual culture may directly offer.
Isabella Gomez-Welsh

Identifying the role that enlightened modernism and post-modernism play in the 21 st century
classroom is an excellent method of deconstructing why our education system is the way it is. Freedman
(2003) identifies the enlightenment period, that which fueled the modernist theory, as “a contract to a culture
based on beliefs and interest, as enlightened knowledge was considered rational and disinterested” (p. 10).
She goes on to differentiate this and postmodernism theory by saying “Postmodernism theory seeks to reveal
what is hidden in modernism; it is to challenge underlying assumptions and that which has been taken for
granted. As a result, we can more clearly see the contradictions of functional rationality in the professional
field” (p. 13). In this way, Postmodernism is at complete odds with art education. Art is the mode of
postmodernism, but structuring it within the American education system, which is inherently driven by the
enlightenment modernist theory, puts it in a limbo of rational, underlying assumptions, and expressive, self-
driven learning. We as art education students and future teachers are educated under a postmodern theory
so as to promote a healthy, progressive classroom. However, the standards we are put under are all still
heavily set in modernism. That is, sacrificing our health to turn in copious amounts of work, the banking-
style of learning, conducting loads of busywork that will never actually benefit us, and overall being told to
care for our students when our professors hardly care for us. This dissonance between what we are taught
and how we are taught perpetuates the cycle of an inhumane classroom rather than actively changing it. This
is because we are taught one thing our entire lives (postmodernist theory) and are treated the same way our
education system has always treated students (disinterest, rational modernist theory). We will never know
any different because we have not experienced any different. This is even more of a challenge in the art
classroom because creating art demands exploration beyond the invisible restraints the education system
establishes. It is impossible to continuously ask for creativity when all students know is how to create work
for a grade, or procreating limited bursts of creativity under extreme time and opportunity constraints.
Therefore, the motives behind art assignments are inherently skewed, as they work against the creative artist
and for the successful student, with the two rarely unifying.