The purpose of this qualitative research case study was to investigate leadership and funding decisions that determine key factors responsible for sustaining arts programs in public schools. While the educational climate, financial constraints, and standardized testing continue to impact arts programs in public education, Eastland High School, the…

Curricular demands and best practices for middle school require interdisciplinary units. Arts integration can provide motivation and a new pathway to learning. This unit focused on inquiry into the natural history of artifacts and rocks recovered from the exposed subsoil of an area near Cedar Falls, Iowa that had been bulldozed as part of…

This article explores the nexus between arts-based research, theory, practice, and policy. It does so through reference to a longitudinal study of ArtPlay, a unique Australian community arts center that offers artist-led workshops involving young people aged 3-13 years. The ethnographic and action research study investigated how children responded…

Art and science help students investigate light energy and practice fair testing. With the goal of finding a way to save "Beady Kid" from invisible rays, students used science practices to investigate the transfer of light energy from the Sun. During this art-integrated science lesson presented in this article, upper elementary (grades…

Author Jaqueline McElhany, reflects upon her experiences, flawed teaching method, and lessons learned during her first year as a middle school art teacher, with a project that involved making West African ceremonial face masks. The article focuses on the changes she made to shift her teaching methods and classroom environment from discipline-based…

Although theater-based interventions have emerged as an innovative health education platform, more research is needed to understand how these interventions work and to identify factors that make them successful and replicable in adolescent populations. This paper discusses the first research project conducted on High School Sex Squads (HSSS),…

In this paper, we examine how Indigenous and non-Indigenous adolescents identify media influences as health/wellness related. We conducted research over a six-week period in two alternative high school settings: a culture-based Indigenous education program at one school and an arts-based program at another school, both in the same small, Western…

The Makecourse-Art is a makerspace designed to promote undergraduate students' aesthetic design skills as well as functional design skills using an interdisciplinary team approach at the University of South Florida. To overcome the unique challenges of the Makecourse (earlier version) and to maximize students' design efforts working on an…

Young children with disabilities are less likely to display age-appropriate social behaviors than same-age peers with typical social development, especially children who display social-communication delays. In this study, two concurrently operating single case designs were used to evaluate the use of progressive time delay (PTD) to teach children…

This article is based on part of the discourse data collected from a 5-month ethnographic study about how first-year learners of English as a second language (ESL) socially interact with their native-speaking peers in a college town in the U.S. Midwest. The data were collected from participant observation at an art exhibition at the research site.…

This practical lesson describes how students in six eighth grade science classes participated in a lesson combining the National Core Arts Standards with the Next Generation Science Standards. The goal of the lesson was to provide visual representations of finch beak form and function so students could better understand genetic variation and how…

This paper examines the research design for an arts-based interfaith research project that is intended to build relationships between children from different faiths and to increase research participants' understandings of faiths other than their own. The project is funded as an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship called "Early Start…

Student engagement and autonomy work to foster growth in students and increase the amount of time they spend creating artwork. Maximizing artmaking time for students is crucial. In elementary art, classroom management is key. In order to address her biggest struggle--classroom management at the beginning of class (student engagement, timing, and…

The role of arts education has been discussed at length throughout the United States for many years. Arts educational programs have maintained resounding successes in graduation and attendance statistics. However, it is unclear if there is a correlation or causal relationship between arts education programs and students' self-efficacy and sense of…

Many youth participate in extracurricular activities, and research has linked activity participation with school engagement and academic success. Social-ecological theory suggests that the social contexts of different types of extracurricular activities may differentially affect student outcomes. Yet, there is scant research examining the relation…