Duncam's Seven Principles

Paul Duncam's article, Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education, published in Art Education magazine, makes a new case for curriculum in art education.  Duncam, like Olivia Gude, agrees that current school arts are much too outdated for our technologically-driven classrooms and offers "seven principles for examining various forms of imagery", which are: Power, Ideology, Representation, Seduction, Gaze, Intertextuality, and Multimodality.  It is these seven principles that guide Duncam's proposal for curriculum in the arts, which he says should not be taken as "fundamental truths", but ideas to create "curriculum commensurate with the extent and complexity of today's visually mediated world."  In the article, Duncam discusses each of these items in depth (which I will not do here, you all read the article, too)  and offers a new way to look at visual culture in the classroom.

There were a few things in this article I liked and agreed with, but for most of it, I felt a bit indifferent.  I think that Duncam had a good idea when he intended to create a new visual culture-based curriculum for the arts, but his ideas, for me, seem to miss the point.  I most liked his passage on multimodality, which seems to be the most important of the seven principles.  Multimodality essentially refers to the fact that when viewing an image, other things will always be affecting your perception of said image.  Duncam says, "images never appear without words, music, or other sounds.  Even in art galleries, images appear with labels, and their assumed significance is deeply grounded in art history texts and columns of written critique."  This seems to be the single most important thing from Duncam's article.  People, myself included, have a tendency to forget that all of these little nuances are affecting the way we view something.  Thus, multimodality was great to read about from this article.  I also liked what Duncam mentioned on intertextuality.  Duncam stated that, "all images relate to other cultural texts such as books, poems, music, and, of course, other images.  I think the reason I liked this passage so much was because it directly correlates to multimodality--an images intertextuality directly affects how multimodal the image is.

For the remainder of the article, I found myself thinking it was sort of "bof" (French sound of indifference).  This article just didn't resonate with me as much as Olivia Gude's did.  I really believe that Gude is the future and "savior" of art education.  Her ideas bring so much more to the table than Duncam's.  And though I hate to hate on him, his article just didn't do it for me.