After reading the introduction to art education with a focus on visual culture, I was better able to understand the importance of arts influence individually and culturally at all levels: classroom, school, neighborhood, community, regionally and globally. Visual culture is blurring with fine arts as students learn to process and react to the world around them as opposed to being confined to the museum as a way to react to art in a specific environment. Specifically, visual culture promotes interculturalism. This is the way in which children can live in an environment at all levels and understand how the levels become separated yet united. For example, a student can identify their neighborhood and interpret its division to the country as a whole, yet can recognize the unity between the two. This promotes children’s mindfulness as they are able to understand their way of living and role the environment plays for context in art. The environment and the art within allow them to discover their individual identities and cultural identities. Once children can recognize these distinctions in environment levels they are able to see the relationship between art and its context more clearly. The important connection between the environment and art allows for context to become more apparent. This then lets children to not only react to fine art, but the art that they view around them every day.
After the industrial revolution, there was an increase in production and manufactured art. Calling many cast iron molds art was skeptical in a world that had only regarded high art as a form of art; however, it did springboard the importance of art in education regardless of its vocational intentions. Today, we are able to recognize that there has been an increase in readily made art due to the industrial revolution as well as the increase in technology and easily available access to it. It is important for children to be able to process the high-stimulating environments they are emerged in by comparing and contrasting environments in order to better understand the context of what they unconsciously and consciously see every day. Children will become more self-directed in an ever-changing environment. The mindfulness of art in the environment creates a person who can adapt even when art is constantly changing and evolving at a faster rate than when other art movements occurred. With that, art education aids the way children interpret the world because in the classroom they are provided opportunities to make art and express their interpretations of the world they view outside of the classroom. This allows for further individual identity and cultural identity development through reflection.
To summarize, the way art and environment are understood creates the disconnect to many of what art is. Educating children to process the art in their environment reduces the misconception that art is only fine art by developing an understanding of context. By reducing this misconception students are able to absorb more of their environment to create an individual and cultural identity more clearly. Through making art in the classroom, children have time to reflect and process what they absorb in their environment every day.
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