Critical thinking is advocated by scholars and educators m most school
subjects. Cognitive approaches to art education are significant trends in recent
years. The author reviews research on what critical thinking entails and the
potential for art educators to engage students in studying visual culture including
artworks.
This paper addresses cogmtlve approaches to art education and review of
literature related to critical thinking. Critical thinking is defmed as 1) metacognitive
aspect to think about our thinking in order to make our thinking better, 2) critical
pedagogical aspect to think about big idea and expressive, symbolic, metaphoric
and other features of artworks and socio-cultural contexts, 3) open mind to tolerate
ambiguity, conflicts, and ill-structured problems in artworks and popular culture
images.
To help preservice art teachers develop critical thinking and examine their
practices of visual culture everyday, the author provides the description of a
project called "I and Visual culture". This project is to engage preservice teachers
in constructive process of examining their identity and visual culture experience.
The preservice art teachers made webbing of themselves with images and texts
related to themselves. Then, preservice teachers wrote about critical reflection of
their visual culture after reading of articles about visual culture study as critical
pedagogy. Finally, they made artworks about themselves with their visual culture.
Analysis of data provided with images and texts is to describe critical features of
the preservice art teachers' work. Ideas about identity, intertextuality, and cultural
stories of the participants are presented. The significance of critical thinking in the
field of art education to study visual culture is highlighted.