When students feel comfortable in the learning environment and are being given authority to make their own choices about what they want to create, they can create significant artworks with different personal expressions through the form of narratives. Students feel this freedom especially when they are not in the regular school environment where…

Our three-year inquiry at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School (GIFTS), a community-based media arts educational center, presents a practical model illustrating how urban youth explore their own strengths and connect themselves to a learning space in a rural environment within the context of filmmaking. It also offers pedagogical insights…

In February and March 2007, the author investigated the possibilities of visual culture art education in two Greek Primary schools in Athens with students in Grades 5 and 6. One of her goals was to determine whether or not the telenovela genre was appropriate as curriculum content in primary art education. She chose telenovelas because they are a…

The aims of educating for economic, cultural, and pedagogical purposes have existed since the early inception of art education. Looking at how and why these aims evolved in the early era of art and design education has potential for better understanding how and why design should be incorporated into the art education curricula today. This article…

Videogames represent one of the fastest growing and most influential forms of contemporary visual culture. In this article, the author looks to five aspects of current videogames: perspective, interactivity, interface, narrative, and time and movement. Each of these videogame modalities is analyzed as related to a wide range of popular media,…

When artists are inspired to travel in Europe to study art and history of the Western world, Italy is a good place to start. With its ancient architecture, rich cultural heritage, and superb works of art, Italy has been the quintessential center of Western art history for centuries. It was the good fortune of Alabama-based artist and teacher…

A rich and stimulating opportunity awaits teachers who plan to connect or bring together an art project with another subject area of the curriculum, thus addressing the sixth listing in the National Visual Arts Standards. While art is important in its own right, the reality is there is often too much content in the curriculum nowadays and not…

Integrating the visual and performing arts is one clear and concrete strategy to engage students in learning social studies content and concepts while making them interactive and relevant to their daily lives. In this article, the authors offer a rationale for teaching integrated arts with social studies, provide a framework for planning, and…

This article discusses the personal experience of reading an Artist-Teacher MA, both as a way of engaging with a course of study aimed specifically at art teachers and also as an attempt to explore and possibly reconcile the pedagogic issues related to the area of critical and contextual studies that had arisen within my own practice. Critical and…

Educator Ernest Boyer believed that well-educated students should do more than master isolated facts. They should understand the "connectedness of things." He suggested organizing curriculum thematically around eight commonalities shared by people around the world. In the book "The Basic School: A Community for Learning," Boyer recommends that…

Interdisciplinary teaching is a great way to focus on overarching concepts and help students make connections across disciplines. Historically, art and science have been connected disciplines. The botanical prints of the 18th and 19th centuries and early work with microscopes are two examples of a need for strong artistic skills in the science…

"Why do they always tell you what "not" to do? Why don't they tell you what to do?" a student in an art education course for certification complained. The course is required for undergraduate students and post-baccalaureates, and introduces multicultural education and topics related to teaching, including educational philosophy, school law, and…

As the economic pressure to teach more students with fewer (and less costly) instructors has increased in higher education, the utilisation of non-career teachers has become more prevalent. Design education has not escaped this phenomenon; non-career teachers, such as graduate and undergraduate students or design practitioners, have become…

In this article, the author describes Internet sites that can help both in-service and pre-service teachers effectively integrate literature and the arts into their social studies instruction. For teachers who already spend time finding and using Internet resources on this topic, some of the recommended sites may seem too basic. Even so, the…

For those considering adopting team teaching, or interested in reviewing their own practice, this book offers an over-view of this pedagogy, its challenges and rewards, and a rich range of examples in which teachers present and reflect upon their approaches. The interaction of two teachers--both the intellectual interaction involved in the design…