notes for my group: Deconstruction/Reconstruction or Art Ed & Visual Literacy

In her article, "Making a Case for Design-Based Learning," which appeared in Arts Education Policy Review, Meredith Davis makes a case for a design-based art curriculum--a curriculum that analyzes the elements of design and applies them to the production of a visual product--as one strategy for "curbing the marginalization of the arts in schools."  She argues that some of the dominant language in education reform arguments (hands-on problem solving, project-based instruction, and portfolio assessment) is borrowed directly from design education and that design-based learning is a natural fit for a constructivist approach to present outcomes-oriented education goals.  Davis sights the work of Michael Joyce, a professor of English at Vassar, as making an argument that "a technological shift in human consciousness, brought about by hypermedia, that is as consequential as the shift from an oral to print culture" has occured and that the processes of writing have fundamentally changed as a result, making it a visual as well as verbal endeavor.

More recently, Renee Sandell of George Mason University wrote "Using Form+Theme+Context (FTC) for Rebalancing 21st-Century Art Education" for Studies in Art Education.  In this article she suggests that the unique needs of the 21st century require a reconsideration of the art education curriculum to equip students to "encode visual concepts through creating art and to decode meaning by responding to society's images, ideas, and media."  Her approach attempts to maintain the separateness of art from other forms of visual culture (she likens it to poetry) while instituting a systemic approach to decoding all visual data (art or otherwise).  Her system recognizes artwork as a product of unique cultural, historical, and technical pressures and attempts to provide a framework for picking apart these details, but she puts more emphasis on unique creative response and less on formal problem solving than the approach advocated by Meredith Davis.

A brief history of one version of the notion of "visual literacy" can be found here:

http://www.ivla.org/org_hist_1st_pers.htm