WdKA Minor+ Visual Culture
After a successful application for a New Minor+ at the Hogeschool, the Willem de Kooning Academy has its first Minor+ called Visual Culture. This course is filled with content and pedagogical methods, which enrich Students Critical Diversity Literacy and therefore became an enriching source for our research in regards to the implementation of inclusive pedagogy. The first run of the course was a beautiful success and we will soon present students works on this blog to exemplify the impact of critical approaches in art pedagogy.
To give more inside into the Course content, it is framed around the following questions:
What is Visual Culture? What is the meaning of an image in our increasingly image-led and image-conscious society and in which way does it relate to the discipline and profession that you are becoming a professional in? These questions are in the centre of the course Introduction into Visual Culture.
The study of visual culture helps us understand everything from cinema to painting, packaging to magazines, development and visualizations of science to marketing strategies. This course aims to help students understand history through the panoply of images that are produced and circulated through various means of production and reproduction, including advertising, cinema, greeting cards, magazines, and webpages, as well as artworks in museums and the public sphere. Students get a grip on theories deriving from the realm of art, film and photography, while understanding the social and historic backgrounds that inform the culture around us. The course combines an interest in art, culture, scientific depictions and media history and explores the broad spectrum of visual creativity that permeates contemporary life and work. Studying Visual Culture in Rotterdam places students in a location with a rich history of arts, design, popular culture and heritage. The city plays its part as a creative city in contemporary visual culture.
Conclusively, visual culture is the comparative study of visualities and beyond, these include visual images and visual media but also extend to the visualizations of the social. Through which we can understand socio-historical, socio-economic processes and the formation of contemporary cultural identities. Specialist staff members encourage students’ visual literacy and enable them to develop a range of critical approaches to visual language and its importance both historically and at the present time.