In a Cultural Vortex: Theme Parks, Experience, and Opportunities for Art Education

Theme parks can have educational value for students and teachers when these cultural sites within the range of visual culture are understood as sites of experiential learning and as processes of mediation between visitors and park designers. Worthy of serious study, the theme park can be explored as a cultural vortex whose swirling forces contribute to the construction of knowledge, even as they open a dynamic territory between dualistic notions of place and space, myth and reality, work and play. Caught up in the vortex are aspects of the historic European pleasure garden, the large city park, the great exposition or world's fair, and the amusement park, which have created the theme park hybrid. As mediation between theme park designers and student-visitors, the nature, complexity, and meaning of this hybrid can be revealed. To understand the work of the playful designer is to understand the art of place-making, storytelling, and experience design. Through the play of the serious visitor, a fixed and storied place is transformed into an improvisational space for multiple interpretations of personal experience. Like the myths they embody, theme parks are clues about the experience of life in a non-dualistic world. For an educators and students, it is important to understand their own experiences of the theme park hybrid, their movements between dualities, and their stories about such movement, as related to teaching and learning.