Issues In Art & Education

The "Big Idea"
The "Big Idea" is connecting broad, important issues to each lesson in order to ensure that students understand concepts as they apply to their personal and professional development. I believe that teaching with the "Big Idea" will not only enhance the art education experience but also allow students to connect their art to the world.

Lesson Plans Using the "Big Idea"

Visual Culture
Visual Culture is such a huge part of our everyday lives in the current consumer society. I think that it is absolutely critical that as art educators, we are able to communicate the importance of being aware of our surroundings.

Dr. Karen Keifer-Boyd writes that, "Visual culture is the nexus between visual objects and their cultural contexts. Visual culture study is the pursuit of meaning of imagery to include fine art, folk art, mass media, design, popular culture, architecture, and other constructed categories of visual phenomena in everyday life. Meaning resides in the intertextual relationships between object, discourse, and viewer.

The significance of visual culture for art education pedagogy resides not so much in the object or image but in the process or practice used to investigate how images are situated in social contexts of power and privilege. Visual culture pedagogy from this theoretical stance questions and reveals who or what is the implied subject and who or what is the object in a specific representation."