Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics, and the Social Life of Art

An updated edition of the first book to focus on teaching the visual arts from a cultural standpoint.

Teaching Visual Culture provides the theoretical and practical basis for developing a curriculum that lays the groundwork for art education at all levels (K-12 and higher education) and across school subjects.

Drawing on material, social, cognitive, aesthetic, and curricular theories, Freedman offers a framework for teaching the visual arts from a cultural standpoint. Chapters discuss visual culture in a democracy; aesthetics in curriculum; philosophical and historical considerations; recent changes in the field of art history; connections between art, student development, and cognition; art inside and outside of school; the role of fine arts in curriculum; visual technologies; television as the national curriculum; student artistic production and assessment; and much more.

Additional content for the Second Edition includes applications of new materialism, ways to document and assess tacit knowledge in students, and uses of AI image generation.

Book Features:

• 17 full-color images new to the second edition.
• Both documents and challenges past and current practices of art education for teacher educators, K-12 teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, school administrators, and community educators.
• Provides a foundation for art education with ways to update curriculum, an exploration of why newer technologies are making visual literacy essential for all learners, and new ideas about the impact of aesthetics on learning.
• Covers contemporary issues essential to addressing the increased impact of visual culture across school subjects, including new brain research, visual culture and the environment, the relationship between the diversity of visual culture and identities, and the visual culture of politics.