Cultural Media and Children

This paper will investigate the influence of cultural media on a child's natural unfolding of symbolic imagery. The paper's discussion will chiefly center upon two important academic works. In the first of those works, writers Brent and Marjorie Wilson discuss this paper's subject in their article, "An Iconoclastic View of the Imagery Sources in the Drawings of Young People." According to those authors, children begin producing art, and specifically, symbolic imagery, from the ages of two to eight (Wilson, 1977).

This important and complex article argues that the art that children first begin to create is drawn from universal symbols which are most likely to have come from cultural media. Cultural media, in this context, consists of anything from a cartoon program, a newspaper comic, an action hero magazine, photographs from magazines and the like. While many teachers previously assumed that children should not be encouraged to copy the works of other authors, these authors maintain that at no time in history did children "ever exist in a state unmodified by the customs of [their] own time and place" (Wilson, 1977, p. 5). This research suggests that it is not unusual, much less bad, for children to rely upon cultural media in their independent creation of art.

Our generation's children are then, influenced by the photography and print media, television broadcasts and motion pictures of our

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sign making skills and become more adept at drawing. Therefore these authors encourage teachers to incorporate images from cultural media, including the fine arts (which they thought were sorely underrepresented in art classes), in their lessons to students. They postulate that a child's natural unfolding of the creative process through drawing is not hampered by their copying cultural images, but conversely, that the more symbolic imagery a child attempts to draw, the more skilled he or she becomes in that particular image's "program." The second academic resource which explores the topic of this paper, is the book, Teaching Drawing from Art. This book also explores the issue of how cultural media influences the unfolding of symbolic imagery. The authors of that book highly advocate teaching drawing by way of example. Specifically, that book explains that art students should have models from which to draw from and that some of the best known models available are existing works of art. For example, students were encouraged to study how other artists work. The authors observed that "although children in a particular culture assimilate the style [emphasis added] of the drawings of other children in that culture," (Wilson
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Approximate Word count = 1569
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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