Notions of Technology and Visual Literacy

For many art educators, the word conjures up visions of overhead projectors and VCRs, video and digital cameras, computers equipped with graphic programs and presentation software, digital labs where images rendered in pixels replace the debris of charcoal dust and puddled paints. We forget that visual literacy and technology have been inseparable since the first rock artist demonstrated to a young apprentice how to make a hand-print with ground pigment. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere (Stankiewicz, 2003b), art education has a special relationship with technology. Not only do we depend on image-making and image-reproducing technologies as resources for student learning, but drawing can function as a language for the invention of new technologies. Perhaps most importantly, ideas about visual literacy have served as metaphorical technologies in contexts of power, making art education a virtual technology for social control. In the paragraphs below, I will partially unpack each of these ideas and suggest implications for art education today.Technologies for Art LearningAlthough many art educators prefer to consider the aesthetic autonomy of the visual arts as the chief context for art education, at least four technological contexts inscribe the field. The Society for the History of Technology (2004) defines technology as methods by which a social group provides itself with the material objects of their civilization. Thus technologies relevant to learning in the visual arts range from tools used by small-scale societies in the creation of images and things, technologies like drop spindles and potters' wheels, through invented media grounded in industrialism, e.g., the crayon (Bellis, 2004), or in romantic, progressive notions of innate self-expression, e.g., finger-paints (Stankiewicz, 1984). When we consider these technologies, these media for art making, within a context of visual culture we must acknowledge that each medium carries its own message about beliefs and values (McLuhan, 1964; Stankiewicz, 2004). The media/technologies favored by a culture both shape and communicate favored notions of knowledge, the preferred beliefs and values of that culture.A second set of technologies foundational to art education is the set of technologies used to reproduce images. We can trace the development of image reproduction technologies in the histories of printmaking and photography, the emergence of mass media. Is it merely coincidence that the 19th-century rise of industrial art education followed close on the heels of the invention of lithography in 1798 as an inexpensive, popular means of producing multiple images, as well as on the development of precursors to silver-based photography between 1816 and 1839? Technologies for mass reproduction might have had little impact without the development of technologies for disseminating images-examples can include magazines, a postal service, and advertising.Beyond image-making and image-reproducing technologies, art education as we know it today needed technologies to support the instruction of large numbers of pupils in rationally organized situations. Early in 19th-century North America, school referred to a teacher with a group of students (Stankiewicz, 2001b). Place could vary from the upper rooms of a church to a home to a warehouse or donated factory room. As schooling became more formalized in imitation of the factory model of specialization with grouping of related processes, schools needed seating. Benches of varied heights supported age-grouping which in turn led toward age-graded classrooms. Writing instruction required smooth surfaces, copperplate models, individual slates and chalk (Thornton, 1996). Later, specially lined paper would replace copybooks. Drawing instruction followed a similar path in which the physical environment provided prerequisites for the opportunity to learn, such as blackboards.At the level of techniques used to administer complex systems (e. …