Thoughts on media images in artistic education: a benchmark for educommunication

Abstract

During the past few years, artistic education has undergone considerable transformation, influenced by a new epistemological approach that, in the sphere of human and social sciences, facilitated the emergence of cultural studies, visual studies and of visual culture and critical pedagogy, and encouraged a series of opportunities to revise this educative field.
One of the most remarkable transformations is probably the incorporation of media images as an object of study in artistic education. For this purpose, traditional approaches that had aesthetic excellence as their object of study were put behind.
Considering this, approaches to artistic education oriented to visual culture, in different ways, open up very interesting perspectives for the study of these media images that come to reinforce, complement and enrich the ways of studying that have been proposed by both educomunication and visual literacy.
This article tries to analyze the arguments and reasons that are offered from this renovated point of view on artistic education, aiming at considering what contribution can be made in order to rethink and improve the field that traditionally has dealt with the study of media images: media education or educommunication, a field with a rich history in Ibero-America.