The art classroom is abundant with opportunities to develop meaningful questions, including one that constantly drives the author's own teaching practice: How might she best engage middle school students in a generative process of inquiry when interpreting and producing creative visual culture? In 2009, Chris Grodowski began translating research…

Empathy can be experienced in powerful ways through art education when students explore and connect with others from different communities and their own concepts of self (Jeffers, 2009). In art education, students see images from various visual cultures and if they are to understand and become open to cultures or groups different from them, they…

The ability to verbalize--and therefore think and learn abstractly--has conditioned people to see the world in logical patterns. People are trained to do so by the wiring of the neurologically typical (neurotypical) brain and the increasing complexity of the environment that shapes it. Public schools are also designed for students with…

A primary goal of substantive art education is to communicate visually--to decipher art for meaning and to construct meaning through images and objects. Strategies available to engage students are the interdisciplinary activities found in performance, visual and written forms of creative expression, and related disciplines such as ethnography,…

It is said that "a picture is worth a thousand words" as visual images can express complex and multilayered ideas. Sometimes photographic imagery is so strong and resonant of certain success, struggles, or events that it becomes key to a community or generation. As historic records, photographs are uniquely able to present not only success and…

In this article, the authors first provide historical context for foundations in artist education at the postsecondary level. They then provide an overview of a first-year art program that challenges the status quo of education about the foundations of artistic expression. Finally, they address the implications of such differing approaches to K-12…

The "Adding Insult to Imagery? Artistic Responses to Censorship and Mass-Media" exhibition opened in January 16, 2006, Kipp Gallery on the Indiana University of Pennsylvania campus. Eleven gallery-based works, 9 videos, and 10 web-based artworks comprised the show; each dealt with the relationship between censorship and mass mediated…

Visual images create desire. As artifacts from contemporary visual culture, visual images inform everyone about society, telling everyone who they are and what they value. They register subliminally within everyone's psyches and alter everyone's perceptions, sometimes without everyone's knowledge. Visual images seem to keep coming and often…

Throughout the year, students of Contemporary Issues and the Visual Arts class, an interdisciplinary course for high school juniors and seniors at a large Canadian suburban high school, devised and created a number of individual and collective artistic investigations and creative cultural interventions, both within the classroom and the larger…