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

Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics, and the Social Life of Art. Kerry Freedman. Reston, Virginia: The National Art Education Association and Teachers College Press, 2003. Illus., softcover, 189pp., $18.00.

Copublished by Teachers College Press and the National Art Education Association, this book provides a solid foundation for teachers to understand visual culture and to develop approaches and strategies to help their students evaluate and create visual messages. The author draws on social, cognitive, philosophical, and curricular theory foundations to offer a conceptual framework for teaching visual culture. The term visual culture reflects the recent global shift of text-based communication to a proliferation of often-seductive visual images and artifacts, especially through visual technologies. Through television, films, advertisements, videos, the Internet, interactive computer games, and the like, the primary way to get information in today's world is visual. If students are to learn the skills and concepts needed for creating, understanding, valuing, and critiquing visual culture as well as art forms, art teachers must guide their students to develop visual literacy-the ability to understand and produce visual messages. The author concludes that, although studying visual culture is useful, making art with a reflective knowledge of visual culture is still the most comprehensive way for students to understand its value.