This article shares how the authors' experience with a graduate course led to creating the Living Museum: Empires Project with a group of local high school students enrolled in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics magnet school's combined advanced language and world issues course. The authors begin with a brief background on how…

This article shares a curriculum developed by preservice art teachers to encourage 9th-grade art education students to learn and create together, making decorative rain barrels to help their community's future and discover how artmaking can help provide sustainable ways to address ecological challenges related to their local environment. A…

This study examines the art pedagogies at Southern African American high schools during the civil rights era (1955-1969). I examine three segregated high schools located in South Carolina as a lens to highlight art pedagogies that were practiced; I expose counterstories by three former students, a student teacher, and the wife of an art teacher; I…

Many scholars and educators are moving toward an anti-oppressive paradigm in art education, transitioning away from imposing norms in an effort to think more creatively about teaching practices and classroom culture (Kraehe, 2019). Reflecting deeper on her position as a White, middle-class, female teacher who taught in an underserved community,…

A curriculum that integrates Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (called STEM education) has been implemented in K-12 schools in the United States for several years. The purpose of this article is to explore the further integration of issues-based art education into STEM education (hereafter-called issues-based STEAM education) to…

This study analyzes "Act Out Justice" (AOJ), a youth theatre for social change initiative of Orlando Repertory Theatre and the University of Central Florida. Employing AOJ's model of reflective collaborative inquiry (Horn et al., 2020), this article dramatizes the practice of responding to one's own work. Through narrative and dialogical…

When talking with New York City educators about the circumstances of teaching during the upheavals wrought by COVID-19, common terms get repeated: "brutal," "chaotic," "confusing," "traumatic," "disorienting," "sad," and "lonely." While art education often includes digital tools…

In 2014, chief executive artist of Reservoir Studio, B. Stephen Carpenter, II, conducted a participatory performance at Edinboro University to draw attention to the global water crisis. During this performance, art and art education students, faculty, artists, and members of the community made hand built ceramic water filters to raise awareness of…

Throughout this article, we explore how multiple arts-based learning strategies (ABLS) helped subvert traditional literacy methods. We ask two large questions: (1) How, as critically conscious educators, might we break down inherent institutionalized oppressive structures and have an education of liberation and freedom? (2) What can we say about…

This paper presents the results of study about an urban high school in Ontario that performed a stage play that portrayed the legacy of the Indian residential schools in Canada. We wanted to know the impact this arts-based response had on teachers and students. From the data that we obtained from focus groups, we identify four learning outcomes of…

In this lively and groundbreaking book, arts educator Marit Dewhurst examines why art is an effective way to engage students in thinking about the role they might play in addressing social injustice. Based on interviews and observations of sixteen high schoolers participating in an activist arts class at a New York City museum, Dewhurst identifies…

This article analyzes the potential of a series of Youth Action Coalition's (YAC) Arts-for-Change (AfC) youth programs for literacy and identity development, as well as for engaging youth in addressing issues of social justice. Drawing primarily on transcripts of interviews, surveys, and participant-observation fieldnotes inventorying changes in…

Beyond having value as an assessment tool, engagement with the arts in the K-12 classroom can offer aesthetic experiences that have the potential to transform the way students encounter the world, engaging the imagination in acts of perception that stir them to "wide-awakeness." Advocates for the arts in education call for a variety of…