Offering a conceptual framework for teaching the visual arts (K-12 and higher education) from a cultural standpoint, the author discusses visual culture in a democracy.

Drawing on interviews, responses to questionnaires, and oral histories by U.S.

The visual plays a central role in multimediated, computerized culture. The question is: how can we exploit the intersections between the visual and the verbal to improve learning? This text explores ways to capitalize on visually connected pedagogy.

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.

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

How to help students negotiate visual culture's potent and multilayered meanings. Engaging Visual Culture is a guidebook for teachers to help students make sense of the pervasive flow of visual information shaping their worldview and way of being. The authors offer practical strategies to help students learn to think critically about visual culture, its meanings, and its impact on their lives. Each of the nine chapters focuses on three key concepts: Expose, Explode, and Empower. By exposing students to the presence and power of visual culture, and "exploding" the passive acceptance of the visual messages all around us, students are empowered to participate actively in constructing their own meanings.

The author traces the history and theory of visual culture asking how and why visual media have become so central to contemporary everyday life. He explores a wide range of visual forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, television, cinema, virtual reality, and the Internet while addressing the subjects of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the body, and the international media event that followed the death of Princess Diana.