Bloomsbury Academic Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum

Contemporary societies are saturated with pictures. They are globally a part of everyday life, and they are seductive, offering values and beliefs in such highly pleasurable forms that it is often difficult to resist their power to persuade. Yet interpreting pictures is largely neglected in schools. Picture Pedagogy addresses this head on, showing that pictures can be used as a powerful form of classroom pedagogy. Duncum explores key concepts and curriculum examples to empower you to support students to develop a critical consciousness about pictures, whether teaching art, media, language or social studies. Drawing on the interpretive concepts of representation, rhetoric, ideology, aesthetic pleasure, intertextuality and the gaze, Duncum shows how you can develop your students' skills so that their power as viewers can match the power of pictures to seduce. Examples from the history of fine art and contemporary popular mass media, including Big Data and fake news, are drawn together and shown to be appealing to the same aesthetic pleasures. Often these pleasures are benign, but also problematic, helping to promote morally questionable ideas about a range of topics including gender, race and sexual orientation, and this is explored fully. Review "The author makes a compelling case for why a better appreciation and understanding of visual culture is necessary for contemporizing teaching and learning in the visual arts." --William Wightman, Professor of Art and Art Education, James Madison University, USA"A labour of love. His deep knowledge of the field of visual culture enables him to contextualise historical links with contemporary concepts such as 'fake news'. In the process provides the reader with significant insights into how to 'read' pictures from diverse and at times surprising contexts. An important and insightful contribution to the field of visual culture." --Margaret Baguley, Professor of Arts Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Southern Queensland, Australia"A fascinating and engaging book for those interested the role of images in contemporary social life. This book is a major benchmark for teacher education programs that address pictures as a form of pedagogy. Duncum weaves together significant interpretive concepts and practical guidance, allowing for theory to be translated into interest-driven teaching and learning for young people." --Maria Letsiou, School of Early Childhood Education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece"An ideal text for systematic and structured examination of 'pictures' in our own time, seeing pictures as value-laden social realities constructed by competing groups' ideological and social endeavors, problematizing past practices of how we see and accept images, but inviting teachers and students to explore them with critical and informed lens offered by Duncum's thoughtful and insightful approach. The questions and classroom activities provided in the book offer an excellent resource for college professors and students who want to view, criticize, and evaluate 'pictures, ' applying contemporary theoretical concepts to the analysis and understanding of everyday and contemporary popular and visual culture. So anyone who is interested in studying the power of pictures, in a different way we used to see, must read the book as the student of the powerful pedagogy of visual culture." --Ryan Shin, Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Education, University of Arizona, USA"This book is definitely one of the essential books today dealing with contemporary art education in the field. It particularly deals with timely but very important issues in visual culture and art education, analysing and interpreting the concept of visual culture and its meaning to art curriculum. The author, Prof. Paul Duncum, is one of the most leading and influential international scholars in the field, one of the founders and an expert in visual culture in ar