Teaching Visual Culture

There are around eight different curriculum approaches in art education. One of the last to be conceptualized was Visual Culture Art Education curriculum. This type of curriculum was influenced by the interdisciplinary movement called visual culture studies. The oversimplified explanation of visual culture curriculum is to help our students become visually literate. You may be saying to yourself, “Don’t art educators teach visual literacy already?” Well, yes and no. Hopefully you are teaching your students the elements and principles, as well as composition, scale and other important ways artists direct the viewer’s visual attention. This is teaching aspects of visual literacy. However, Visual culture looks at all things visual, not just visual art. Visual culture could analyze artifacts like tools, a counties currency, medical X-rays, restaurant interior designs, films, movies, youtube videos, or political advertisements. The possibilities are literally endless. Visual culture greatly expanded art educator’s curriculum.

Why would they do this? The short answer is because students are being exposed to this visual information anyway, most often impacting them negatively, and someone needs to help students be visually literate to counter its negative impacts. No, one else is the school is capable of addressing visual culture literacy, only the art teacher.

If you have chosen to venture into visual culture curriculum, I recommend Practices of Looking: and Introduction to Visual Culture, by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Having taught a graduate level visual culture course since 2014, I am familiar with the many visual culture studies texts that have been published. Many of the authors of these books can get esoteric and use confusing postmodern jargon. It is for this reason I recommend Practices of Looking. They do an excellent job clarify terms concepts and have good visual examples of what they are talking about. I recommend this book for art educators to read, not so much for students. It is easy enough to read that high school students could read it and understand it, but I recommend you read it and then be inspired by the book to teach a lesson or two on the topics they explain in the ten chapters. This book has been around for a while and has several editions, so you can find a used one for cheap. The book is around 450 pages, and is worth the read.