Diversity, Visual Culture, and Pedagogy

Catalog description

Diversity issues in museum and K-12 art education contexts. AED 812 Diversity, Visual Culture, and Pedagogy (3) This course examines diversity, visual culture, and pedagogy in various settings: the artworld, popular media, and cultural settings such as schools and museums. Diversity pertains to gender, sexual identity, social class, ethnicity, ability, age, and other attributes that shape our identities. This course pays special attention to issues of power and privilege in relation to diversity and visual culture. It examines ways that various forms of visual culture, situated in various social contexts, teach us who we are, what is "normal" in our society, and how we might change oppressive social conditions that currently exist. As defined in the course, visual culture includes paintings, sculptures, prints, and other forms of fine art as well as advertisements, news images, scientific images, television programs, and films. It includes toys, comic books, children's art and more. Visual culture includes all manifestations of cultural life that are significant for their visual features. Pedagogy refers not only to formal methods of instruction, such as teaching and learning in classrooms. It also includes informal instruction through the arts, the media, popular forms of entertainment, and other social practices. Pedagogy includes being positioned by, or addressed in certain ways by various forms of visual culture. It includes the ways we actively interpret, use, and recreate forms of visual culture in our lives. Objectives of the course include understanding diversity as defined in relation to various forms of visual culture; understanding the complex interactions of ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity, and other aspects of diversity in visual culture; understanding issues of power and privilege in relation to visual culture; and understanding pedagogical issues related to visual culture, including forms of address and interpretation, as well as pedagogical practices such as teaching and learning in classrooms. By the end of the course, participants should be able to critically examine social constructions of race, class, gender, sexual identity, and other aspects of diversity in visual culture through both written and visual analyses. Participants should also be able to develop and implement units of instruction related to visual culture, and reflect on their own and others' teaching practices in schools and museums.This is one of the required courses for the M.P.S. in Art Education. It is offered every other year with a maximum enrollment of 15 students.