Name: Eva Lord

Full APA Citation for Author(s), Title, Date, Source, Publication Company:

Freedman, K. (2003). Teaching visual culture: Curriculum, aesthetics and the social life of art.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Main Idea/Purpose (2-3 Sentences):

The main idea of chapter 1 is opening the discussion of why visual culture is necessary in
the art classroom. Diving into the topics and teaching methods that might have been used
in the past, Freedman (2003) examines the importance of including the current social lives
and interests of the students into the curriculum.

Short Overview (Including at least 2-3 important quotes from the reading):

Chapter 1 of Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics, and the Social Life of Art covers
using visual culture in art education in today’s classroom. The two key points of using
visual culture in the classroom beyond the fine arts and identifying the viewer as a key part
of the artmaking process are heavily discussed. The majority of students spend a generous
amount of their time outside of school absorbing visual culture from a variety of different
platforms. As this becomes more prominent in their daily lives, the boundaries between
education, high culture, and entertainment blur within the art classroom (Freedman,
2003). Creating a curriculum that opens up the possibility for students to include these
elements in their work is essential as their social lives become the driving force behind
their artistic decisions. In the K-12 classroom, students guided through finding their voices
in the process of creation. Whether they are making a representation of an object, emotion,
or specific story or topic, there is a social aspect of the project. There is a point that they are
trying to get across though a nonverbal conversation with the viewer. The maker is only
one part of the development, it is the viewer that completes the work and what is produced
is a social relationship (Freedman, 2003). Through the use of visual culture in the
classroom, students will be able to fully express themselves with a curriculum that is
relevant to their daily lives.

Critical Response: Reflections and/or relevance to personal art educational

experiences/or teaching experience (Do you agree/disagree with the reading? Why?
How does it relate to your own experiences in the classroom as a student/teacher?)

This reading was particularly difficult for me to wrap my head around after one read, so I
read it through twice. In the second, and more detailed read through I found that I agreed
with the points that were being made. Even as a preservice teacher I know that I will
excitedly change my curriculum if new ideas or relevant works of art are brought to light
by my students or peers. Freedman (2003) used multiple examples of theory and specific
artworks to piece together a variety of ideas that she had explained in separate sections of
 Name: Eva Lord

the chapter. Using these examples not only helped me better understand the content of the
chapter, they were also a demonstration how several different sources beyond traditional
artwork can be used to back up a thought or process in the art classroom.
 Name: Eva Lord

Full APA Citation for Author(s), Title, Date, Source, Publication Company:

Freedman, K. (2003). Teaching visual culture: Curriculum, aesthetics and the social life of art.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Main Idea/Purpose (2-3 Sentences):

The purpose of chapter 2 of Teaching Visual Culture (2003) is to start a discussion with the
reader about form and aesthetic qualities of art in art education. Freedman works her way
through multiple theorists with different explanations as to the significance of these
qualities in the classroom.

Short Overview (Including at least 2-3 important quotes from the reading):

Freedman (2003) begins the chapter by comparing the positives and negatives of
aesthetics, saying that it comes with beauty as well as a force of persuasion. Aesthetics and
form can be the elements that make us want to look at visual culture, but can also push
people into using stereotypes, having unrealistic body image, and partaking in
consumerism (Freedman, 2003). Teaching this to students will then change the way that
they look at art into a more close minded sense compared to the social creation/viewing
that was discussed in the previous chapter. Freedman emphasizes that students should be
able to look at art with an open mind and looking purely at the aesthetic form will
condition “students to approach visual culture as a series of objects isolated from larger
social meanings.” This section of the reading continues to discuss the different ideas of
aesthetics in art by theorists and critics including Kant, John Dewey, Walter Benjamin to
name a few. Through these theorists Freedman addresses their points of view but
continues to defend that the combination of aesthetics and meaning of social visual culture
should be valued together.

Critical Response: Reflections and/or relevance to personal art educational

experiences/or teaching experience (Do you agree/disagree with the reading? Why?
How does it relate to your own experiences in the classroom as a student/teacher?)

I thought that this chapter was incredibly informative, and I agree with Freedman’s (2003)
point of view when it comes to not solely focusing on aesthetics when examining and
creating art. At one point Freedman mentions that “for students not training to be arts
professionals, it is probably less important to understand facts than it is for them to
understand why the arts exist, the contributions of art to individuals’ lives, and its social
significance.” When I was in school, up until the end of my senior year of high school, I had
no idea what I wanted to do with my life after school ended. So many of my teachers would
be drowning us in terms and little pieces of information that only made the subject seem
less attainable for me as a career choice or even an interest in the school setting. I chose to
deeply study the subject of art in high school with the tools that I was given by instruction
throughout the project and learning through my peers. I would have become just as
 Name: Eva Lord

disinterested in the arts as any other subject if all my teacher did was spout off facts to
memorize that were not important to the deeper meaning and understanding of my work.
Through this chapter my opinions on this topic were validated.
 Name: Eva Lord

Full APA Citation for Author(s), Title, Date, Source, Publication Company:

Freedman, K. (2003). Teaching visual culture: Curriculum, aesthetics and the social life of art.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Main Idea/Purpose (2-3 Sentences):

The main idea of chapter 3 is to expand on the importance of bringing together art history
and visual culture in the art classroom. Freedman (2003) expands on the upbringings of
individual students and schools and its effects on their education with and without the
combination of visual culture and art history.

Short Overview (Including at least 2-3 important quotes from the reading):

The chapter begins by discussing the main points of importance in teaching past and
present visual culture. Freedman (2003) discusses how students need to have knowledge
of art history in their practice today, but they need to be able to make this connection to
visual culture. The issue is that students are exposed to different forms of visual culture
depending on components such as where they live or what type of school they go to. Some
students may be exposed to art in its true form in a museum, and some students may be
looking at small photos, the size of a thumbnail in a sketchbook. Students see this work and
are often taught about its characteristics of the time and not how its characteristics are
related to art or what they experience today. Freedman states that “The educational
challenge of teaching visual culture of the past is not merely a matter of teaching art
history, but rather the bigger issue of helping students to develop an understanding of the
rich social life of visual culture” (p. 43). Bringing together the discussion of historical art’s
visual culture and todays visual culture is what is necessary to close that educational gap. If
students are not provided with an education on how to apply contextual information to
their artwork, they will have a skewed understanding of how visual culture fits in to
historical works of art or cannons. For students to be able to have a full understanding of
art, educators need to put an emphasis on exposing students to new forms of art in places
that are accessible to them. According to Freedman, “When students do not have contextual
information, they create their own contexts,” (p. 54) ones that may not connect to what the
artist was meaning by a work of art. Correct contextual information leads to more
insightful discussions and interpretations of art because students will have that base of
knowledge to start from.

Critical Response: Reflections and/or relevance to personal art educational

experiences/or teaching experience (Do you agree/disagree with the reading? Why?
How does it relate to your own experiences in the classroom as a student/teacher?)

I agree with this chapter of the reading because of how deeply in depth Freedman (2003)
went into describing the importance of not focusing solely on one old or new subject or
history of art. In my own personal experience, I was lucky enough to have a few instances
in elementary school where we would learn about a historical artist and be able to put our
own new spin or perspective on their work to make as our own. I do not have a memory of
 Name: Eva Lord

one specific project, but I can recall listening to the teacher show art from a historical artist
at the beginning of a project, but we would be creating things relevant to different subjects
that we happened to be learning in school. Unfortunately, when I was in high school art it
was not the same. I took five different art classes in high school and the only art figure that
was contemporary or historical, beyond peer examples, that we were ever exposed to was
one in a research project for one week of class, strictly in our own homework time. It is
classes like these that stick students into a headspace where realism is the only relevant
form of art because that is all we see every day. Real objects, real people, real examples.
Without the exposure and explanation related to historical art, contemporary art, and
visual culture students like me are left to make their own artistic assumptions and
decisions with no frame of reference.
 Name: Eva Lord

Full APA Citation for Author(s), Title, Date, Source, Publication Company:

Freedman, K. (2003). Teaching visual culture: Curriculum, aesthetics and the social life of art.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Main Idea/Purpose (2-3 Sentences):

Chapter 4 discusses the main idea of cognition in the arts. Freedman (2003) picks apart the
process of thinking and knowledge in the artmaking and interpreting processes and their
relationship to emotions.

Short Overview (Including at least 2-3 important quotes from the reading):

Emotion is often seen as THE motivation and reasoning behind art by those who are not
educated in the realm of the arts. When an artist is going through the process of research,
brainstorming, and creation, and looking at other works there is more to it than strictly
emotion. Cognition is heavily used in this process to connect meaning to making.
Knowledge is not pushed aside to be overtaken by the creativity and emotions of an artist.
They are used together to thoughtfully generate ideas and compositions that have a
purpose, that can speak out on an issue, that can change someone else’s way of thinking.
Freedman (2003) discusses this as a new understanding of cognition and that it involves
changes in the instructional methods used to enact curriculum. The use of visual culture in
cognition is yet another aspect of the curriculum that needs changing in art to be in
accordance with the individual student. Teaching insightful ways of thinking in artmaking
is only going to be effective if the student themselves is able to absorb it. Using visual
culture as a way to bring cognition into the art classroom is useful because it gives students
a personal relationship to their work. When a student is able to relate their artwork to their
personal lives and ways of thinking, that is when their desire to learn more and dive into
the “why” of artmaking shines through. Students take to heart what they are seeing in
visual culture each day, so “advertisements, films, soap operas, news programs, computer
games, and so on, can lead to a cognitive fusion of visual culture and the fiction that is
suggested as reality” (p. 68).

Critical Response: Reflections and/or relevance to personal art educational

experiences/or teaching experience (Do you agree/disagree with the reading? Why?
How does it relate to your own experiences in the classroom as a student/teacher?)

In my own personal experience, I have always thought of the cognitive aspect of artmaking
to be incredibly important, possibly too much to the point it has affected me negatively.
Before college I was a raging perfectionist, who has now toned down to be a more
appropriate level of perfectionism. But it was not until the beginning of my art ed classes
where I was given a good idea of how to merge the frustrating aspect of cognition with
emotion in my work. Cognition was my emotion, meaning that it would anger me and show
in my long painstaking work process before college. Now because there is a curriculum that
is built to merge the two, and I am learning how to build a curriculum like that myself, I am
able to find the balance. Perfectionism can come from the cognitive and emotional sides of
 Name: Eva Lord

artmaking. As Freedman (2003) discusses throughout the chapters, the effort to create a
curriculum that appropriately addresses the two is what will guide the students to a
greater understanding and appreciation for artmaking.