Assembling Visuality: Social Media, Everyday Imaging, and Critical Thinking in Digital Visual Culture

Abstract

Abstract Art education faces significant curricular challenges through the confluence of two contributing innovations that are transforming learning in the art classroom: networked digital technologies and shifts in curricular focus to a visual culture pedagogy. These shifts present forms of visual research in student’s learning that may involve crowdsourcing a community of users, analysis of the social practice of tagging, or assembling image collections that allow students to engage in understanding visuality. Visuality, as a central construct of critical thinking in visual culture, assembles social constructions of images that are often invisible to understand the performativity of visual culture in constructing our social worlds. Efforts to augment the curriculum of a university-level art education course to explore the opportunities social media provides to build students’ critical thinking skills in their relationships to images in a visual culture are reviewed. These investigations in visuality and social media provide an indication of the ways that the field of art education, through a visual culture pedagogy, may contribute to critical thinking in a participatory culture.