Journal Entry #10

Journal 10: Discuss the relationship between popular culture and art. Why is it important to provide children with a range of media from traditional/historic media to contemporary/popular art media?

I have a four-year-old cousin who gave me a perfect example yesterday of the relationship between children, pop culture, and art. My cousin wanted to do a craft. Of course, I was extremely excited about this. I had a few ideas, which I suggested. But instead of going for these, he went on the computer and found some online crafts based on television shows. We ended up printing off some pages to color and then fold into a fan.

It seems to me that the relationship between pop culture and art is a lot stronger than it was when we were growing up. This has the potential to be a good thing. It is great that a four-year-old knows how to search out crafts on the computer. There were some pretty neat crafts on the website. He also was listening to music from the same website and this is a positive influence on his artistic development.

However, there are many educational experiences children miss when their artistic experience is computer-based. It is extremely important to provide children with a range of media. Popular culture is thrown at children these days through a variety of media so much wider than what we had as children. They have television, internet, computer games, books, magazines, as well as a variety of different video gaming systems. This has the potential to help children learn, but I find that it is shortening their attention span and encouraging them to be more concerned with television characters than any other kind of media.

With the children we will teach in our classrooms, I think it is of utmost importance to provide them with a range of media. It would be a very interesting lesson to connect a character or characters from their favorite television show to a traditional media figure. For example, if drawing portraits, you could have them draw one contemporary figure and one traditional figure (Hannah Montana and the Mona Lisa…). That way, the kids can feel engaged in the assignment but you still have the opportunity to teach them something new.