An exploration of media violence in a junior-high school art classroom

Abstract

This article reports a classroom investigation into how a group of American junior high-school students understand, interpret and act upon a social issuesbased art curriculum designed to explore issues of media violence. Using critical pedagogy, the research goals were to establish students' attitudes, values, creative skills, learned concepts, and/or opinions on media violence; and to illuminate and evaluate the issues-based curriculum approach. The study took place in the art workshop of a Saturday Art School programme at a midwestern university in the United States. A finding was that the young participants' attitudes towards media violence coincided with some of the views of postmodern educators concerning protectionist approaches to media education. Some challenges for implementing a social issues-based curriculum orientation were identified, for example the complexity involved in examining a given social issue.

Empowering Elementary Students’ Ecological Thinking Through Discussing the Animé Nausicaa and Constructing Super Bugs

“…Ecological issues are far more complex than we were able to tackle in a limited amount of time, but classroom exploration of such issues can be a basic step in promoting an initial dialog (Chung, 2007). Since lack of class time is a perennial problem for art teachers, we suggest that teachers: 1) View the animé for the first 20 minutes for students to capture the essence of the ecological message.…”

“…Equipping students with critical thinking skills will help change attitudes and allow students to pursue diverse opinions (Chung, 2007).…”