An important revival in art education seeks to provide adolescents with art projects that are culturally and politically relevant to their lives. Stimulated in part by both a postmodernist attitude and the attention to visual culture, such projects address content that is meaningful to students' families, their futures, and their society. These…

Like many parents in the US, teen mothers regularly have professional portraits taken of their children. This article, based on an ethnographic study of a diverse group of teen mothers in urban California, analyzes these baby pictures as representations of childhood, motherhood and family, and as material objects used in the construction of kin…

Digital cameras are a piece of technology routinely used by students. To demonstrate the camera's use as a scientific instrument, the author developed an exercise to challenge students' scientific creativity and provide an experience in the scientific research process. Students designed and carried out experiments to determine the distance from…

Look no further than to the popularity of C-SPAN's annual video documentary competition for middle and high schoolers, and it's obvious that video editing, and the technology that comes with it, is important to today's students. In the past it was a complex, involved, and expensive process. Video editing is now within the reach of anybody with a…

This article describes a photo essay contest of high school students in the Turning Point Program located in Ithaca, New York. The theme of the contest was "communicating what it means to have an emotional disability." The goals were to help raise awareness in the community, in the school, and in individual students about what it means…

Photographs are a major aspect of high school science textbooks, which dominate classroom approaches to teaching and learning. It is thus surprising that the function of photographs and their relation to captions and texts have not been the topic of analysis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence, function, and structure of…

This study assessed adolescent females' self-reported attraction and interest in dating adolescent male bullies and victims of bullying. Thirty-six 9th and 10th grade female adolescents (mean age = 15 years; 69.2% White; 30.8% Non-white) from a city high school in the Mid-Atlantic United States examined three photographs and listened to a verbal…

In some contexts, a photograph may be worth a thousand words. Previous research revealed a dialectical character of photographs: they simultaneously lack determinacy and exhibit an excess of meaning. The purpose of this study was to understand how, under this condition, high school students interpret photographs that were accompanied by different…

In 2001, the "All Sky Camera Network" came to life as an outreach program to connect the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) exhibit "Space Odyssey" with Colorado schools. The network is comprised of cameras placed strategically at schools throughout Colorado to capture fireballs--rare events that produce meteorites.…

The word "suburbia" evokes a wealth of imagery such as model homes, spacious yards, and minivans from movies, commercials, print advertisements, and television shows. These Utopian ideas of suburbia are partly truth and partly myth. Popular media's powerful portrayal of suburbia can be traced back to the wholesome 1950s' and 1960s'…

Self-portraiture is a great project to introduce the study of color schemes and Expressionism. Through this drawing project, students learn about identity, digital cameras, and creative art software. The lesson can be introduced with a study of Edvard Munch and Expressionism. Expressionism was an art movement in which the intensity of the artist's…

Despite some spectacular e-learning failures in recent years, e.g. the British government's "e University", educational technologies have continued developing and have made advances in several learning paradigms. These new learning paradigms appear as new ways to deal with the old traditional learning concepts and philosophies throughout…

A study describes an easy procedure based on a negative photoresist process designed for junior high or high school students, which will introduce them to the key terms and concepts of photolithography. The experiment allows students to visualize the fundamental process behind microchip fabrication, observe the rapid prototyping enabled by such a…

State-of-the-art digital cameras open up enormous possibilities in the science classroom, especially when used as data collectors. Because most high school students are not fully formal thinkers, the digital camera can provide a much richer learning experience than traditional observation. Data taken through digital images can make the…

Studying "Caenorhabditis elegans" ("C. elegans") live cultures provides excellent opportunities for authentic inquiry in a high school anatomy and physiology or other biology lab course. Using a digital dissection microscope, a student can photograph the organism during various stages of development and study and analyze the images. In this…