W2 Visual Arts

 W2 Visual Arts

Highlights from the 1995 interview with June K. McFee include not only her biographical context in her own life, but also the discussions mentioned centering women’s roles in art education - how without their pioneering ways of thinking, education today would not yet have seen the deep importance that Visual arts hold in society, not for the arts alone but also for anthropology, women’s rights, the pedagogy of diverse groups of children, sociology and psychology. McFee felt that, “…learning is a behavioral adjustment, and the education that society needed was guided change in behavior.“ and this is still a message and ideal we follow in education today. 

I know of zines, independent artists I follow on social media have used them to illustrate life changes and emotional growth, to share personal journeys with the outside world. 

I love the idea of the zine library. I wish it was the kind of place you could find accessibility, not just in the northwest, and people could be compensated for their hard work there - that it could be a legitimate job. It makes sense though that it isn’t, because zines aren’t legitimate published. I like the idea of breaking free of the consumer and producer molds in art - too often in mass media we find art that’s pretty and without substance, that pleases the masses while remaining impersonal. Zines eliminate this and get vulnerable one on one with the reader. I would love to create a zine in my classroom, it’s definitely appropriate under the right prompts. 

I feel like the information in this last video that pertains best to the classroom is the information that reaches the kids: parodies. Kids today (and even in the age that this video presentation was created) find ‘memes’ ans other parodies of visual culture extremely attainable. They flood social media, and make up a lot of the younger generations’ communication. I’d say items 1-4 are valid ideals, mostly because there’s so many items that make up a “culture,” and many different ways to describe it, depending on the context and setting of the word’s usage. I could use these defining items in the classroom by showing my students the variety of explanations that go into culture, illustrating that culture is diverse and for different people it’s made up of many different things.