Pictorial image in contemporary visual culture and new image layouts in art education

The changes in the position and function of artists in the understanding of art based on the developments in modern technology have in turn brought about the necessity that changes should be made in the approaches to art education.Different artistic approaches that emerged in response to the changing aesthetic concerns particularly in the last fifty years as an alternative to traditional canvas picture. The reason why the audience cannot understand modern artistic works is probably that they have not been taught to acquire such abilities. Thus, art educators are thought to cover a serious deficit if they can teach the students how to develop artistic skills. The institutions that train artists and artist educators offer courses such as analysis of artistic works at graduate and post-graduate programs. In addition to this, it is also thought that the integration of interdisciplinary workshop courses (for example, courses focusing on project proposals) discussing both socio-cultural phenomena and images of modern visual culture into the program will answer to a significant need.In this context, the lack of works concerning the effects of visual culture and socio-cultural phenomena on the images in the pictures of the students has been the source of this research.The broad objective of the study is to identify the effects of visual culture and socio-cultural phenomena found in the images in the pictures of the graduate students. Further, it was also investigated whether the effects of visual culture and socio-cultural phenomena vary in the socio-demographic traits of the students.This is a qualitative study. The data were collected on the basis of qualitative research methods. In this respect, the related literature was reviewed and Personal Information Form (Scale-A), semi-structured Interview Form (Scale-B) and Document Analysis (Scale-C) were used as three different tools.In this study 147 of the 248 third and fourth students at the faculties of education and fine arts of three universities were interviewed.The following qualitative and statistical techniques were employed in the analysis of the data of the interview form and personal information form? Content analysis (qualitative)? Frequency and Percentage DistributionTo sum up, it was concluded that specifically internet, television and press, visual culture variables, had a considerably positive influence on the images in the pictures of the graduate students. In addition, the environment, one of the socio-cultural phenomena, also had a considerably positive influence on the images in the pictures of the graduate students, yet politics and religious beliefs did not. On the other hand, economy had an adverse effect on their images. It was also concluded that these factors yielded significant differences in relation to the socio-demographic features. In the end, findings and results were interpreted based on the related literature and a number of recommendations were provided.