Abstract
Teacher opinions and discussions about Visual Culture Theory and Material Culture in art education are examined in this paper. Both approaches were compared and evaluated within their contents and fundamentals. Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE) in art education, specifically, has been criticized as having a Neo-Marxist or Cultural Marxist agenda stemming from Critical Theory, nonetheless, it is also viewed as being just another recent Postmodernist approach. Being a controversial theoretical account, VCAE seems widely unknown and not understood in its conceptual frame among art teachers in Turkey. Its name also may have caused confusion. In this study, art teacher opinions of VCAE content, principles, applications and practices were collected through a survey questionnaire; and examined. Participants were 71 art teachers. A purposeful, convenient, random sampling method was employed to represent a population of art teachers from various backgrounds, with various experience levels, with educational experience from various universities, working at various geographical regions and towns in Turkey. The study was designed and structured as descriptive survey research. Analyses revealed that art teachers usually are not aware of the typical discussions about VCAE. Having been criticized as an ideologically rooted theory, the applicability of VCAE in Turkey seems controversial in many aspects.
 Keywords: visual culture, Modernism, DBAE, VCAE, critical pedagogy, Postmodernism, neo-marxism
Highlights
Visual Culture Theory (Visual Culture Art Education, VCAE) is rooted back to the Cultural Studies, which emerged during the 1960s in England
Responses to question #1 showed a strong (50.7%) disagreement, and these results might be connected with the same perspective as already mentioned. Another question based on VCAE principles was question #2: “Do you think that discussions of societal issues of gender, identity and power relationships bring politics into the art classroom?” Table 2 below shows the responses to this question
Research question #1: “How much and to what extent are art teachers informed about Visual Culture Theory, its principles and content?” While almost all questions of the survey (1-10, except #8), aimed to clarify to what extent art teachers are informed about the VCAE and its theoretical principles, each survey question focused on one aspect of the VCAE content, applicability of the content, or the possible issues to be encountered if applied in educational settings
Summary
Visual Culture Theory (Visual Culture Art Education, VCAE) is rooted back to the Cultural Studies, which emerged during the 1960s in England. Even though McFee did not have the power to make a difference in the highly conservative 1940s and 1950s, she was well aware that changing popular cultural atmosphere and cultural conditions required new understandings and approaches in education, and that studies required the diversity of values reflected through media in American society. She pointed out that art teachers should not have been limited to TV and movies, but should take buildings, clothes, decorations, advertisements, posters, cartoons and other diverse popular media and their meanings into consideration. The idea of change, on the other hand, is not a new concept, for over a century academicians have been working on inclusive models regarding new industrial production process and teaching students about the new media (Chalmers, 2005)
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