Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum

by Paul Duncum

Overview

Contemporary societies are saturated with pictures. They are globally a part of everyday life, and they are seductive, offering values and beliefs in such highly pleasurable forms that it is often difficult to resist their power to persuade. Yet interpreting pictures is largely neglected in schools. Picture Pedagogy addresses this head on, showing that pictures can be used as a powerful form of classroom pedagogy. Duncum explores key concepts and curriculum examples to empower you to support students to develop a critical consciousness about pictures, whether teaching art, media, language or social studies. Drawing on the interpretive concepts of representation, rhetoric, ideology, aesthetic pleasure, intertextuality and the gaze, Duncum shows how you can develop your students' skills so that their power as viewers can match the power of pictures to seduce. Examples from the history of fine art and contemporary popular mass media, including Big Data and fake news, are drawn together and shown to be appealing to the same aesthetic pleasures. Often these pleasures are benign, but also problematic, helping to promote morally questionable ideas about a range of topics including gender, race and sexual orientation, and this is explored fully.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350144644
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/11/2020
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	7.44(w) x 9.69(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Paul Duncun is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, USA, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania, Australia.

Table of Contents

List of Figures viii

Copyright Key xi

Using this book xii

Introduction 1

Picture power 1

People power 2

1 What is Visual Culture? 5

Defining visual culture 5

Visual culture today 13

Why is visual culture important? 18

Pictures and reality 22

Questions 23

Activities 23

2 Representation 25

How pictures represent 25

What is represented 36

What is not represented 40

Idealized representation 44

False representations 45

A final note 49

Questions 50

Activities 50

3 Visual Rhetoric 51

Pictures argue 51

Defining rhetoric 52

Fine art as rhetoric 54

An aesthetics of emotion versus a rhetoric of emotion 62

Reimagining the history of art as an aesthetics of emotion 64

The elements of rhetoric 65

Summary 79

Questions 79

Activities 80

4 The Pleasures of Aesthetic Seduction 81

Aesthetics defined 81

A pluralist view of aesthetics 82

Seductive pleasures 83

The many pleasures of pictures 108

Questions 109

Activities 109

5 Some Problems of Pleasure 111

Everyday pleasures and their problems 111

Summary and implications 128

Questions 128

Activities 129

6 Gazing and Glancing 131

The concept of the spectator's gaze 131

Among the many ways to look 132

The picture, people and place dynamic 132

The pleasures of the gaze 138

The power of the gaze 143

An ethical agenda 145

Reflexivity and responsibility 147

Questions 148

Activities 148

7 Intertextuality 151

What is a text? 151

What is intertextuality? 152

Social semiotics 153

Intertextuality and rhizomic structures 154

Collective cognition and distributed creativity 158

Online youth culture as smart swarms 160

Summary and implications 163

Questions 164

Activities 164

8 Picture Appraisal 165

What is appraisal? 165

A linear sequence 166

The Visual Culture Appraisal Compass 168

Summary 179

9 Postmodern Curriculum 1: Intertextual Connections 181

Recapping intertextuality 181

An intertextual, rhizomatic curriculum conceptualized 181

Addressing teacher anxiety 184

A curriculum journey 185

Summary 195

Questions 196

Activities 196

10 Postmodern Curriculum 2: Movie Making 197

The dominance of visual narratives 197

Collective creativity 198

Stupid swarms 198

Enter education 199

Movie making in the classroom 200

Operating online 211

Finally 213

Questions 213

Activities 213

Glossary 215

Further Reading 219

Bibliography 221

Index 223

Editorial Reviews

Clear and bright in both form and content, [this] is a gift of theory and practice for every dedicated educator intent on applying visual pedagogy.” —International Journal of Education Through Art

“I believe that the book can inspire teachers at primary and secondary school levels to reconsider their teaching approaches in teaching visual culture. The book provides international art educators with a potential new direction for, and a tangible approach to, the learning and teaching of visual culture, providing a wide range of theoretical and practical viewpoints to support the author's ideas. In Picture Pedagogy, Duncum emphasizes the significance of criticality on images as the compelling discussion of picture power and people power, which could be considered a new methodology revamping and deepening visual culture art education.” —Studies in Art Education

“The author makes a compelling case for why a better appreciation and understanding of visual culture is necessary for contemporizing teaching and learning in the visual arts.” —William Wightman, Professor of Art and Art Education, James Madison University, USA

“A labour of love. His deep knowledge of the field of visual culture enables him to contextualise historical links with contemporary concepts such as 'fake news'. In the process provides the reader with significant insights into how to 'read' pictures from diverse and at times surprising contexts. An important and insightful contribution to the field of visual culture.” —Margaret Baguley, Professor of Arts Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

“A fascinating and engaging book for those interested the role of images in contemporary social life. This book is a major benchmark for teacher education programs that address pictures as a form of pedagogy. Duncum weaves together significant interpretive concepts and practical guidance, allowing for theory to be translated into interest-driven teaching and learning for young people.” —Maria Letsiou, School of Early Childhood Education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

“An ideal text for systematic and structured examination of 'pictures' in our own time, seeing pictures as value-laden social realities constructed by competing groups' ideological and social endeavors, problematizing past practices of how we see and accept images, but inviting teachers and students to explore them with critical and informed lens offered by Duncum's thoughtful and insightful approach. The questions and classroom activities provided in the book offer an excellent resource for college professors and students who want to view, criticize, and evaluate 'pictures,' applying contemporary theoretical concepts to the analysis and understanding of everyday and contemporary popular and visual culture. So anyone who is interested in studying the power of pictures, in a different way we used to see, must read the book as the student of the powerful pedagogy of visual culture.” —Ryan Shin, Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Education, University of Arizona, USA

“This book is definitely one of the essential books today dealing with contemporary art education in the field. It particularly deals with timely but very important issues in visual culture and art education, analysing and interpreting the concept of visual culture and its meaning to art curriculum. The author, Prof. Paul Duncum, is one of the most leading and influential international scholars in the field, one of the founders and an expert in visual culture in art education. This book is one of the must-buy books that can certainly inspire international art educators and students, and be a major resource for the study of visual culture in art education.” —Chung Yim Lau, Associate Professor, Department of Creative and Cultural Arts, Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

From the Publisher