Critical pedagogy 2.0: Researching the visual culture of marketing with teenage co-researchers

This study researched the efficacy of critical pedagogical teaching models in art education through a participant action research case study of my own critical pedagogical teaching practice. It compared the results of two new media art courses I conducted with urban teenagers. In both courses, the students critically researched the visual culture of marketing, particularly the marketing practice of coolhunting and its relationship to contemporary teenage art and visual cultural production. In coolhunting, teenagers are hired by marketing agencies to gather cultural data on their peers using still and video cameras to formulate representative images of cool youth culture for distribution through an ever-increasing variety of traditional and emerging media. A postmodern student-centered pedagogy modeled upon Dewey's method of critical-democratic inquiry was employed in one course. The other course employed a teacher-directed, emancipatory critical pedagogy.;From this comparison new knowledge was generated about my teaching practice. This new knowledge instigated the development of a new pedagogical model that integrates what this study suggested are the most effective components of both pedagogies employed in this study. This integrated model is offered as an example to other art educators interested in re-contextualizing critical pedagogical approaches to teaching visual culture in the contemporary postmodern era dominated by marketing and new media technologies.