Summary

      In this research brief I will look at way art educators could use news media as a means for understanding global conflict and suffering that takes place beyond our immediate experience.  As an example, I use the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 as an issue of exploration, and consider how various aspects of that conflict came to be part of my awareness through images.  Specifically, I am interested in the way Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE) can be used to examine what we know about global issues and also provide a means for processing complicated geopolitical and humanitarian issues.  Below I provide a brief description of VCAE and how I have applied it to researching and deciphering the Syrian conflict and refugee crisis, but I present this as only one example.  In practice, I would have students select their own issues of personal interest to investigate.

            A Visual Culture oriented approach  to art education (VCAE) is  the practice of examining our visual life, and mining it for its unseen significance.  Eisner (2001), Jay (2002), Duncum (2002), Tavin and Hausman (2004) have written on the rationale and best practices for VCAE as an alternative to typical K-12 art education which generally consists of formal aesthetic artworks produced and viewed within the realm of the institutional art world.   In contrast, VCAE  embraces the entirety of visual experience, including news media, Google image searches, and advertising, as salient and educational (Jay, 2002).  Examination is especially necessary in this era of  rapid and constant image consumption (Jay, 2002).  Gardelis (1995) sums up this reality:

"The sun never sets on the great media empires. Their satellites tremble as they pass above in the dawn sky; TV screens flicker with their chatty anchors and rapping gangsters. Their icons pop up on every computer screen as the new universal code. Their images are ubiquitous" (Gardelis, 1995, p. 2).

Increasingly, my students are using Google Image searches to do research and find references for drawing.  It is interesting to look at how these search results create parameters for our understanding of things and events beyond our immediate experience.  Google becomes the first place my students and I go when we want to visually grasp something new.  Using key words to generate hundreds of images sorted by relevance, can be an effective way to begin to understand the  world of imagery related to a topic, and the results themselves tell a story about our global connections.  However, conducting research through Google Image search also requires a certain amount of visual and media literacy in order to identify legitimate and trustworthy sources.  These skills for image-based research need to be explicitly taught while we use the internet as a valuable source for understanding the larger world in a pedagogy of global education.  Bastos (2009), citing Kirkwood (2001) states, "Global education has been defined as the socialization of students into international citizenry, or as a process of acquiring appreciation of human diversity and cultures and the complexity of the international system." (Bastos, 2009 p.261).  In my teaching practice I am experimenting with units that aim to use news media and Google Image Search-derived imagery as a gateway into this appreciation, socialization, and hopefully discernment of complexities.  Tavin and Hausman speak to the importance of this, " Make no mistake about it, we in art education need to examine what is happening in our visual culture, and what we do in our classrooms should make sense in this age of globalization" (2004, p.48).

            According to Duncum (2002), visual culture art education is best developed through the practice of making images.  In my piece, Images are not Enough, I went through a process that I hoped would help me make sense of some of the influx of imagery and news bites I had been absorbing about the Syrian conflict that began in 2011.  I sought to maintain a freedom to explore the meaning of the images that depict the violence, geographies, and refugee issues connected to the Syrian conflict for myself.  I was driven by questions about the impact of these visuals on myself and by extension, on society. I began by looking up images by using the key words that I associated with the conflict after years of consuming news: Syrian civil war, Syrian refugee crisis, Syrian refugees in Europe, Syrian Refugees on Boats. From there I took in the sea of imagery and found myself noticing what was compelling me, how I was relating to the imagery of suffering, loss, hardship, and war as a person with the privilege of relative social and material security.  I sought to create an image that captured the sense of being flooded by news of complex, hard to understand realities and layered on top of that the imagery that had most seared into my mind through the media.  In addition, I added slogans found on protest signs related to refugee migration into other countries--some welcoming, some quite the opposite.   As the artist, I invited spontaneity, divergent thinking, independence, and the somatic experience into the cultural studies process.  For proponents of VCAE this coalition of vision, inquiry, thought, and creativity preserves the "spirit of art education" and leads to learning that prepares students to be critically engaged, twenty-first century, and global citizens (Duncum, 2002, Eisner, 2001, Tavin & Hausman, 2004).  The art-making alone though is not enough, and neither are the images.  My processing of the imagery through art making helped me to spend more time contemplating where I fit in this world, but it didn't necessarily bring me any closer to knowing the truth of what the experiences are that I was depicting.  The exercise is not complete without asking:  Whose is shaping the narrative? Whose story is being told, and how? What can we know from the imagery and what can we not know?  Even though I went through this process of spending time with the images and the real lives they portray, I cannot say that I have a deeper understanding of the Syrian war from that alone.  I also had to read more and work to put together a holistic understanding of the conflict through articles that offered nuance and analysis of this complex struggle.

In addition, I sought out contempoary Syrian artists whose work may illuminate the issues from another perspective.  I found the work of Tammam Azzam, created between 2010 and 2016, to tell a compelling chronological story of the increasing tension, violence, destruction, and emptiness that has marked the Syrian War.   The ideal VCAE artistic practice engages in an inquiry-based design process involving stages of discovery, planning, doing and assessing (Duncum, 2002).   Art lessons that emerge from a VCAE practice engage critically with a visual aspect of students' lives and seek to uncover how it functions in culture. The teacher aims to provide a larger context and poses questions that interrogate the object's relationship to people, its cultural value and back-story.  "Teachers can ask their students: What images/ objects are most meaningful to you? What are the stories associated with these images/objects? What do these images/objects say about me and others?" (Tavin & Hausman, 2004, p. 51).  Students then apply these uncovered truths as image makers themselves.  My intention is to provide, through art education, a meaningful way to decipher the influx of imagery from around the world and begin to locate myself, my students and our individual and collective opinions and perspectives in relationship to the larger world. 

References:

Bastos, F. (2009). Border-crossing dialogues: critically preparing art educators for participation     in global society. In E. M. Delacruz, A. Arnold, M. Parsons, and A. Kuo, (Eds.) ,Globalization, art, and education (pp. 261-268). Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Duncum, P. (2009). Getting real: Toward pedagogy for a love of mediated violence. Journal of  Cultural Research in Art Education, 27, 154-163. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1037025467?accountid=10920

Duncum, P. (2002). Visual culture art education: Why, what, and how. International Journal of    Art & Design Education, 21(1),14-23.

Duncum, P. (2002). Clarifying visual culture art education. Art Education, 55(3), 6-11.

Duncum, P. (2001). Theoretical foundations for an art education of global culture and principles   for classroom practice[Electronic version]. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2(3), 1-15.

Eisner, E. (2001). Should we create new aims for art education? Art Education, 54(5), 6- 10.

Gardelis, N. (1995). Editorial. New Perspectives Quarterly, 12(4), 1-2.

Jay, M. (2002). That visual turn: The advent of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 1(1), 87-92.

Kellner,D. (2000). Multiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogy in a Multicultural Society.  Accessed on 3/21/15 at: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays

Kirkwood, T.F. (2001). Preparing teachers to teach from a global perspective. The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 67(2), pp.5-12

Tavin, K., & Hausman, J. (2004). Art education and visual culture in the age of      globalization. Art Education, 57(5), 47-52.

A website housing the collection of works by Syraian artist Tammam Azzam:             http://www.ayyamgallery.com/artists/tammam-azzam/exhibitions