A visual arts education promoted through a lens of visual culture fosters the idea that students can influence social change through their artmaking practices (K. Freedman, 2003a). Instructing through this lens is by far harder than teaching simple artmaking techniques. But Alison Aziz, similar to Kerry Freedman, became an art educator because…

This article discusses how the authors utilized Disney animations, including "Moana" (Musker, 2016), "Zootopia" (Howard et al., 2016), "Coco" (Unkrich & Molina, 2017), "Encanto" (Howard et al., 2021), and "Raya and the Last Dragon" (Hall et al., 2021), to discuss LGBTQIA2S+ representations and…

In this article, the author discusses how video games can be studied in the Media Arts/Arts classroom in terms of their educational potential through three steps of visual literacy to effectively deconstruct a video game for critical thinking. She first looks at how games demonstrate visual representation; second, how games teach visual…

Teaching visual literacy provides students with tools for questioning and understanding the world while creating meaning through visual art. Wanting to know how students make meaning together while making art, this article centers the convergence of collaboration and visual literacy in early childhood artistic practice. Approximately 200 students…

Years before the term "visual literacy" came to light in 1969 (Felten, 2008; Reis, 2013), British designer and art educator, Kurt Rowland, wrote, illustrated, and meticulously designed a series of art education textbooks called "Looking and Seeing." The intent was to teach visual awareness in a way that increased the capacity…

Offering art education and art experiences to marginalized student populations provides a break from the academic familiar and creates space for radical possibility both in the art classroom and across academic contexts. This article shows the value of artists-in-residence within community colleges, which tend to serve low income, racial minority,…

This article adds to the small collection of art education studies on video games (Parks, 2008; Patton, 2013; Sweeny, 2010) by critically examining the association between violent video games, the U.S. military, and mental disability--from a critical disability studies perspective. Derby overviews the controversies surrounding violent video games…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate how purposeful and substantive visual art experiences might support the literacy learning of elementary-aged boys. The overarching research question that guided this exploration was: What happens when Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) art discussions and related artmaking are infused into a…

The second semester of the new art education studio art course that the author teaches, which explores the possibilities of literacy learning through the visual arts, yielded an unexpected outcome. The author worked together with the art department chair to establish the fundamental criteria for this course and write the syllabus. The course is…

This article demonstrates how Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) art discussions and subsequent, inspired artmaking can help reach the goals of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, & Technical Subjects (CCSS-ELA). The authors describe how this was achieved in a remedial…

As new media emerge in the common culture, the authors recommend that art educators adopt those media to facilitate deep understanding of visual culture and literacy. They report here on applications of an online image gallery that helps users develop ways to interpret what they see and compose. Over the past few years the authors have…

Today's students need visual literacy skills and knowledge that enable them to encode concepts as well as decode the meaning of society's images, ideas, and media of the past as well as the increasingly complex visual world. In this article, the author discusses how art teachers can help students understand the increasingly visual/material…

Art is visual literacy, some would say more basic than writing and speaking, because it is not hampered by the barrier of language. The process of creating a visual narrative and understanding visual literacy is multi-faceted. Because similar cognitive strategies are used in the practice of both visual and written literacy, incorporation of…

Activities involving photographs stimulate visual perceptual awareness. Children understand visual stimuli before having verbal capacity to deal with the world. Vision becomes the primary means for learning, understanding, and adjusting to the environment. Photography can provide an effective avenue to visual literacy. (Author)

The perceptual encounter with works of art, after all, is the core of aesthetic experience. How well such encounters succeed for people has to be a central concern of art education. (Author)