Images used in visual arts
education textbooks for
secondary education: A study
in Spain
In this article we report on a study of images in visual arts education textbooks
in the Basque Country (Spain). Studying textbooks is important because they are
used extensively in Spanish schools. Our initial theory is that student’ lives are rich
in images, mainly from media culture, but their textbooks, in contrast, offer more
traditional images of art. Our analysis of images in the textbooks identified very
different types of artistic images to the media ones. We saw a different use of them;
‘art’ is given a higher priority and is defined by aesthetic and hegemonic historical
criteria. We could see a different treatment between artistic images and media
culture, which seemed to imply a hierarchical relationship between the two. What
seemed to us to be missing were links that might allow students to make meaningful
connections between art and media culture images and the students’ life experience.