Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and Beyond the Classroom

About the Book

In classrooms, museums, public health clinics and beyond, the educational uses of visual media have proliferated over the past fifty years. Film, video, television, and digital media have been integral to the development of new pedagogical theories and practices, globalization processes, and identity and community formation. Yet, Brian Goldfarb argues, the educational roles of visual technologies have not been fully understood or appreciated. He contends that in order to understand the intersections of new media and learning, we need to recognize the sweeping scope of the technologically infused visual pedagogy-both in and outside the classroom. From Samoa to the United States mainland to Africa and Brazil, from museums to city streets, Visual Pedagogy explores the educational applications of visual media in different institutional settings during the past half century. Looking beyond the popular media texts and mainstream classroom technologies that are the objects of most analyses of media and education, Goldfarb encourages readers to see a range of media subcultures as pedagogical tools. He illuminates the educational uses of visual technologies in schools and other venues. The projects he analyzes include media produced by AIDS/HIV advocacy groups and social services agencies for classroom use in the '90s; documentary and fictional cinemas of West Africa used by the French government and then by those resisting it; museum exhibitions; and TV Anhembi, a municipally sponsored collaboration between the television industry and community-based videographers in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Combining media studies, pedagogical theory, and art history, and including an appendix of visual media resources and ideas about the most productive ways to utilize visual technologies for educational purposes, Visual Pedagogy will be useful to educators, administrators, and activists.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Ethos of Visual Pedagogy

Part One. Historicizing New Technologies in the Classroom

1. Media and Global Education: Television’s Debut in Classrooms from Washington, D.C., to American Samoa
2. Students as Producers: Critical Video Production

3. Critical Pedagogy at the End of the Rainbow Curriculum: Media Activism in the Sphere of Sex Ed
4. Peer Education and Interactivity: Youth Cultures and New Media Technologies in Schools and Beyond
Part Two. Visual Pedagogy beyond Schools

5. Museum Pedagogy: The Blockbuster Exhibition as Educational Technology

6. A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism, and Postliberation African Film
7. Local Television and Community Politics in Brazil: Sao Paulo’s TV Anhembi
Appendix: An Annotated List of Media Organizations, Distributors, and Resources

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :

Brian Goldfarb is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He was Curator of Education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City from 1993 to 1997.

Review :
"[F]ascinating... Visual Pedagogy contains an excellent annotated appendix, which includes a list of media organizations, distributors, and other resources referred to in the rich case studies, enabling a reader to follow up any individual case study. The book does a fairly admirable job of walking the difficult line between theory and practice, always a slippery slope..."--Lynn D. Dierking, Anthropology of Education Quarterly "Goldfarb's book steps into a breach in our understanding about the role of the visual and the media in the broad cultures of education and pedagogy during the late 20th century... Recommended."--L. R. Baxter, Choice "Goldfarb has succeeded to write a clear and very readable appraisal of the use of visual media while avoiding the gobbledegook of many books on media theory."--Stefaan Van Ryssen, Leonardo "This is a well-written and well-considered book that will be useful to academic practitioners and students alike. It is a critical text that is theoretically aware and explicit, but accessible... Visual Pedagogy crosses disciplines and is of interest to educationalists, anthropologists and sociologists of the visual and of media, as well as media and cultural studies. It is also an invaluable text for practitioners and especially for those who combine theory and practice in audiovisual production."--Sarah Pink, European Journal of Communication "[C]hallenging and engaging..."--Ann M. Ciasullo, Feminist Teacher "[T]he uniqueness of this work resides in its emphasis on the video practices of young people themselves and on the broader implications of notions of pedagogy and "development" as they link up with visual culture and the moving image."--Richard Armstrong, Film Quarterly Listed in Afterimage, Cultural Critique, Critical Inquiry, CHE. Abstract in Communications Booknotes Quarterly and Education Week. Reviewed in Journalism Educator and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator.