Research in Visual Arts Education - The National Society for ...

ISSUES IN VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION
The communicative aspect becomes important as soon as one becomes aware
of the role of mediation in human life. According to Roger Säljö (2000), “the
concept of mediation is (…) very central and maybe that assumption in a
socio-cultural tradition which is most different from those of other leading
theoretical perspectives” (p. 81). It suggests that the human being does not
stand in a direct, immediate and un-interpreted contact with her environment.
In human culture, reality is mediated by physical as well as mental/
language-based tools.
Nineteenth-century educators commonly used metaphors of literacy
when they wrote about learning to draw. Subsequently, however, metaphors
of art as language shifted from those focused on comparisons with writing
to those comparing art with literature, i.e., reading. Mary Ann Stankiewisz
(2003) defines the two approaches in the following way:
The metaphor of art as language tends to focus on expression, on making art as parallel to
writing. The metaphor of art as text, on the other hand, emphasized interpretation rather
than creation, reading a work of art for knowledge and moral inspiration (p. 322).
Overlapping the visual arts, there are mediators such as TV, picture books,
illustrated newspapers and journals, comics, advertisements, home pages,
computer games, photo, video, film, stage design, etc. Competence in using
these and other media is sometimes called mediacy, in contrast to the similar,
but more narrowly defined concept of literacy.
The visual culture approach emphasizes the context rather than the specific
media of visual arts education, the perception of images rather than their
production. In classroom practice, the perspectives of visual communication
and visual culture do and should overlap, but for analytical purposes it
will make sense to keep them apart.
Stankiewisz (2003) makes the following policy statement:
Liberating visual literacies require critical knowledge of images in their cultural and historical
contexts, as well as analyses of power relationships underlying their social construction.
Our students need an art education that goes beyond drawing and painting,
beyond technique of formal analysis, toward functional visual literacies that will help
them shape and understand the visual cultures in which they live (ibid.).
The Danish researchers Karsten Arvedsen (2003) and Helene Illeris (2002)
criticize the bias, in studies of visual culture, towards interpreting visual artefacts
exclusively through the lenses of sociology and anthropology. According
16 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION