Interpreting Visual Culture as Cultural Narratives in Teacher Education

Although many teachers explore art images with students as a source of personal inspiration for artmaking, they rarely interpret images as visual culture. Such images exist within networks of culturally learned meanings and power relations that surround the production and consumption of images. Teachers rarely consider how viewers negotiate meanings by linking images with cultural narratives that help them understand the ways cultural knowledge is learned, performed, and may be transformed. This study shows how elementary preservice teachers in an art methods class investigated an image using codes of representation; their own subjectivities; cultural-historical contexts; intertextual connections and modalities; cultural narratives; potential social consequences; and, responsive action.