A major theme that has intersected
throughout all of my classes this semester is Media’s influence on art making,
specifically popular culture as a significant means of learning. As a result
popular culture has made an impact on my artwork, and helped to expand my
understanding of how humans understand and experience media’s influence on
their lives. The insight I have gained from studying popular culture that I am particularly
curious about is how the idealized representations shape and limit perceptions
of reality. In relation to the k-12 classroom, I am interested in how to teach
the deconstruction of popular cultures pedagogy. However popular culture is not entirely bad, because
it is a part of our world. We are almost constantly being exposed to it, and
informal learning communities are now a large part of our lives. Unless, you
move to a remote location underground and live without any form of connection
to other human beings.
The two articles
that I have read during this semester that really seem to discuss and explore
how to deconstruct and benefit from popular culture are “Youth on YouTube as
Smart Swarms “(Duncum, 2014) and “Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture:
Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary Art Classroom” (Tavin and Anderson
2003). Paul Duncum (2014) summarizes the article as, “Viewing YouTube culture
as a creative, collaborative process similar to animal swarms can help art
educators understand and embrace youth's digital practices” (p.32). After
comparing the similarities between school-age youth and animal swarms, Duncum (2014)
points out that, “Smart swarms are not always smart” (p.35), similarly youth on
YouTube also act this way, because of their age. However, he states that both
the power and the limitations of youth on YouTube can offer opportunities for
institutional education to remain relevant. He lays out steps as a guide for
teachers to fallow on how to instruct their students on how to utilize basic
filming and editing skills so that they can better articulate their intentions.
The second step would be for students to upload their work onto YouTube and respond
to the criticism of viewers with comments and/or with new productions. Third the
teacher and class would need to write up rules of engagement to either discuss
or censor the transgressive offensive material that occurs in popular culture.
The last step is to make a point to let your students know that YouTube’s
primary focus is to use the material that is created by its users as a billboard
for advertisers, not as a means of self-expression. This last step discusses
the idea that the primary educational task that needs to be addressed when working
with popular culture, is to produce and prepare students to acknowledge the
power of commercial interests and ambiguities.
The article
mentioned earlier “Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in
the Elementary Art Classroom” (Tavin and Anderson 2003), relates to “Youth on
YouTube as Smart Swarms “(Duncum, 2014). The steps that Paul Duncum provides
for art educators to fallow when utilizing the power and limitation of popular
culture are similar to the steps that Tavin and Anderson use in their article.
In “Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary
Art Classroom” Tavin and Anderson (2003) point out the idealized
representations that can be a product of an oligopoly like Disney, and its
ability to shape and limit perceptions of reality through those products. After
bringing to light the power of Disney and the misrepresentations that occurs within
their products, Tavin and Anderson provide an example of a lesson that was taught
to fifth grade students on how to deconstruct popular visual culture in an art
classroom. The teacher lead students in healthy critical thinking discussions
by asking questions like, “How do you define stereotypes”? Then the students
watched video clips from Disney movies, and the teacher lead more discussions
by asking questions that pertained to the movies. This helped students to make
connections between the stereotypes in their lives and what they might be
seeing in popular culture. Once the students began to notice the
misrepresentations the teacher assigned a project where the students created
art that was in response to the stereotypes, and example from the lesson was
the students created movie posters that illustrated their re-visioned movie. From
my own inference of the two articles I think it would be beneficial to create a
curriculum where the steps provided by the authors are incorporated from the
articles. Below is a video from YouTube that could be a project that was
created from the lesson.
Reference List
Duncum, P. (2014). Youth on YouTube as Smart Swarms. Art Education. 32-36
Tavin, K.M, Anderson, D. (2003). Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary Art Classroom. Art Education. 56, 21-24+33-35
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