The term "visual culture" includes all manifestations of cultural life that are significantly expressed through visual aspects and interpreted through individual and shared experiences. Visual culture includes art, cultural practices, media images, and other forms. However, teaching visual culture involves more than extending the range of visual artifacts in school curriculum. It also entails understanding and using those artifacts in new ways. Visual culture is not based on traditional modernist concepts of aesthetic experience, artistic genius, or elements and principles of design. It is based on understanding cultural practices as ideology, social power and constructed forms of knowledge. Teaching visual culture requires a critical examination of the power of visual culture to shape the ways in which people come to know the world and themselves. In this article, the authors describe five sample activities that help empower teachers and students to understand, critique, and re-envision the ways in which the world is constructed through visual culture. Emphasizing the need for critical work, the activities are preliminary examples linking current theories to classroom practice. These sample lessons are not etched in stone. Instead, they are points of departure from dominant educational paradigms that enable art teachers to explore relationship between larger historic, social, and economics constructs, and the ways teachers and students are situated in position of power and privilege. (Contains 5 figures.)