• Cartoon and Animation Studies
• /
• s.35
• /
• pp.29-65
• /
• 2014

Visual culture art education (VCAE) seems to be the new paradigm for art education after postmodernism. Getting beyond the traditional art education, VCAE has expanded its scope of interest to include the visual environment that surrounds our life, thus pushing the boundary of art education beyond the traditional fine arts to cover pop culture and visual art. VCAE shares the issues as well as a lot of elements of culture and art education and in fact serves as a major theoretic background for culture and art education, in that it pays attention to the sociocultural context of images and emphasizes visual literacy and constructionist learning. In this paper, I have reviewed the theoretical background and related issues of VCAE with a view to presenting a direction for animation education, which is gaining in importance coming into the Age of Digital Media. VCAE was born in the progressive cultural atmosphere from the 1970s and thereafter, and its gist consists in figuring out visual artifacts and their action in order to improve individual and social life. Yet, VCAE continues with its development according to the changing aspects of visual culture, and currently, it is expanding its scope of interest to cover the esthetic, experiential education in visual culture and construction of meaning through digital story-telling. In the visual environment of the Digital Age, animation is establishing itself as the center of the visual culture, being a form that goes beyond an art genre or technology to realize images throughout the visual culture. Also, VCAE, which has so far emphasized visual communication and critical reading of culture, would need to reflect the new aspects of the visual culture in digital animation across the entire gamut from experiencing to understanding and appreciating art education. In this paper, I emphasize on Cross-Curricula, social reconstruction, the expansion of animation education, interests in animation as a digital media, and animation literacy. A study of animation education from the perspective of VCAE will not only provide a theoretical basis for establishing animation education, but also enrich the content of VCAE, traditionally focused on critical text reading, and promote its contemporary and futuristic orientation.