Why A Child Needs A Critical Eye, And Why The Art Classroom Is Central In Developing It

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Why a Child Needs a Critical Eye, and Why the Art Classroom is Central in Developing it
Linda Knight

Abstract
It is a common acceptance that contemporary schoolchildren live in a world that is intensely visual and commercially motivated, where what is imagined and what is experienced intermingle. Because of this, contemporary education should encourage a child to make reference to, andconnection with their ‘out-of-school’ life. The core critical underpinnings of curriculumbased arts appreciation and theory hinge on educators and students taking a historical look at the ways artists have engaged with, and made comment upon, their contemporary societies. My article uses this premise to argue for the need to persist with pushing for critique of/through the visual, that it be deliveredas an active process via the arts classroom rather than as visual literacy, here regarded as a more passive process for interpreting and understanding visual material. The article asserts that visual arts lessons are best placed to provide fully students with such critique because they help students to develop a ’critical eye’, an interpretive lens often used by artists to view, analyse andindependently navigate and respond to contemporary society.
JADE 29.3 (2010) © 2010 The Author. JADE © 2010 NSEAD/Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Introduction Visual literacy is an aspect of contemporary school curricular that might describe a process of building visual acuity in unpacking and reading contemporary, visual material. Although not exclusively so, visual literacy is not often included as partof the visual arts curriculum but is often placed elsewhere such as in studies of English. This article aims to challenge this fairly recent curricular arrangement by calling for a return to educational interdisciplinarity whereby the wider school curriculum supports the arts as a central place from which to examine a child’s relationship with visual culture. Rogoff (1998) suggests the status ofvisual culture is a study area that provides teachers and students with opportunities to explore the diverse and elusive contexts of visual images. This freedom also suggests a possible problematisation of how visual culture is commonly engaged with in many schools. Curriculum cannot support for example, colonisation of particular skills within a hierarchised system of disciplines, but shouldinstead apply a sensitivity to thinking about how best a child might forge relationships with contemporary culture. The visual culture I refer to in this article encompasses contemporary and historical artworks produced by artists as well as the visual adverts, television, video, digital interfaces and the like of popular culture. I will assert that critique of visual culture should radiate from the artclassroom. I will support this assertion via a comparative discussion of three video production projects that fulfilled different objectives, were initiated by teachers with varied skills and pedagogical expertises, and produced diverse responses from the students. I will conclude by making a call for a rethinking of current curriculum around the teaching of visual culture. Critique within visualarts education The arts classroom cannot hope to be central in engaging students in critiquing the visual material of contemporary society if visual arts education curricular remains attached to modernist ideologies (Hughes 1998). Until a shift occurs at the executive level of curriculum planning, an assumption about what visual art education ‘is’

will remain firmly conceptualised as particularstudio practices such as ceramics, painting, drawing and Eurocentric art history study. Historical ideologies, such as the apprentice practice model, or arts appreciation based on structural semiotics methodologies (Peirce 1991; Saussure 1983) do not engage students with some current artist methodologies (such as bricolage, appropriation, virtual realities), key to much contemporary visual arts...