For the past 100 years beauty has been marginalised in Western art and regarded as a problematic notion in a range of cultural contexts. Art educators tend to associate experiences of beauty with passive appreciation rather than active engagement, while researchers of children's understanding of art characterise references to beauty as evidence of…

Previous studies indicate that ideas related to special education could influence the way arts education is performed and motivated in schools. Further investigation is therefore required in order to raise awareness of how perspectives on inclusion can serve as a starting point for arts education, and vice versa. This article takes it starting…

This article reports on the understandings and practices of primary teachers in implementing the arts curriculum since the 2010 introduction of National Standards in Numeracy and Literacy within the New Zealand Education system. The ever-mounting pressure on schools to perform to these standards has resulted in a reduction of emphasis and time…

Many classroom teachers turn to arts integration as a method for meeting multiple learning objectives but are less than prepared to do so. The "Collaborative Residency" program offered classroom teachers an intensive course of study through collaborative work with teaching artists as they co-planned and co-taught arts integrated units…

The aim of this study is to find out the artist image 5th grade elementary students have in their mind. Study group consisted of 60 students from the 5th grade elementary school in Rize province of Turkey during the 2014 instruction year. For data collection, an interview form was used consisting of 9 questions developed by researcher. An expert…

Examining practice, within education, is complex and never straightforward. It is not a surprise that when we conduct research, we discover new and contrary meanings. For the last 16 months we have been examining different means for supporting teaching and learning of the arts in primary schools. Our aim was to better understand how to teach the…

This study investigated three arts education partnerships in California elementary schools. The research questions that guided the inquiry were exploratory in nature and intended to reveal the day-to-day functioning of these partnerships, the challenges they faced, and the factors that contributed to their success, through the recounted…

With the intent of improving understanding of cuts to elementary arts programs, the purpose of this research was to investigate how one urban school district (Lansing School District in Lansing, Michigan) eliminated its elementary arts specialists. Research questions were (1) What policy conditions enabled the Lansing School District's decision to…

This case study reports on an arts-based project called "Tree-Mappa," one that sought to engage primary-school children in learning about their local environment through significant trees. Pedagogical approaches featured the use of arts-based strategies as the means for activating cognitive and affective responses and learning. The frame…

This article focuses on ways of building preservice primary teachers' confidence in teaching art with artworks and, in particular, on how to develop their pedagogical content knowing. It is suggested that through opportunities offered for engaging in observational and reflective practices with artworks an initial groundwork is set that can…

We contend that multimodal literary responses offer a space for students to integrate art in the interactive composing process in a way that fosters creativity that normative schooling practices often foreclose. In this qualitative study of three African American fifth-grade students' design processes, we theorize literacy as embodied to analyse…

People are storytelling organisms who, individually and collectively, lead storied lives. Their ways of knowing and responding to the world are essential to understanding the ways in which they think and learn. Children, teachers, and school leaders understand the world through multi-layered lived experiences; and therefore, how we make sense of…

The use of higher order thinking skills is necessary for the education of gifted and talented students in order to ensure that these students, who have development potential compared to their peers, use their capacities at maximum level. This study aims to present gifted and talented students' reflective thinking skills, one of the higher order…

This qualitative case study of a southwest regional elementary school used interviews, focus groups, and document collection to better understand how this arts-integrated school is meeting the needs of English-language learner (ELL) students, discerning increased test performance on state standardized tests. Data were analyzed using open coding.…

During this inquiry, I describe my journey as a beginning arts-based researcher, using this methodological approach to explore the "peak experiences" of five, second-grade gifted students in a general classroom. Concerned with collecting valid data from young children through traditional interviewing techniques, I turned to Arts-Based…