The United States has a visually stunning history of documenting its natural lands. In the late 1800s, Hudson River School painters captured national parks in the west (National Park Service, 2017). Ansel Adams is famously known for his rich black-and-white photographs of Yosemite and other national parks from the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Works…

In this article Matthew Etherington shares his experiences, successes, and challenges in implementing a 7th-grade fashion design unit in which he attempts to realize his curricular vision through critical visual culture pedagogy and role-playing. During the 4-week lesson period, Etherington's instructional checkpoints were broken into three main…

Place-based education incorporates local communities into school curriculum, recognizing the importance of local traditions, communities, and ecosystems, and emphasizing content that has reference to community life and local ecology. One elementary art teacher worked to connect place to her own artistic identity and to her work teaching elementary…

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…

The demands of art projects in public schools may not fit with reality for many exceptional students because the project outcomes are often too specific (Henley, 1992). One strong motivator for students is looking at and discussing visual culture, involving all the images they see and all the visual experiences they have every day. This pedagogy…

An artist-educator examines her experience through the lens of constructivism. The author realized she needed to develop a plan for the art program at her school that would permeate the community, school culture, and the lives of students. Students needed skills, instruction, and a reason to make and appreciate art. The author developed a plan…

A student's lack of belief in his or her own ability to do well in school can be a driving component of disengagement. In response, the author created art activities aimed to build students' confidence in their ability to learn, carry out a given art task, and identify a competence; such asset-based thinking approaches encourage students to reach…

Having an answer to "When are we ever going to use this in real life?" is important to middle school mathematics teachers. The activity described in this article awakened sixth graders' understanding of how artists use mathematics. By exploring ratio and proportionality in different paintings, students realized the use of proportional…

A time-honored and pervasive tradition has taken root in art classrooms. It goes like this: The art teacher plans experiences, often called "visual problems" (Vieth, 1999, p. 4), for pupils to execute. Students are then encouraged to "solve" these problems in their own way, but the end result, more often than not, is…

In this article, the authors describe how mathematics teachers and art teachers were able to enthusiastically engage seventh- and eighth-grade students in an interdisciplinary activity focused on scaling, proportional reasoning, and measurement by recreating artwork on a famous private collection. Using the artwork from The Barnes Foundation in…

Writing about the teaching artist practice should mean writing about art making. As both teacher and artist, the authors are required to be cognizant of their own art-making processes, both how it works and why it is important to them, in order to make this process visible to their students. They also need the same skills to write about how and…

This section is full of stories from teaching artists working to clarify what needs to change within their practices and moving toward solutions--whether it's supporting a classroom of learners in new and unexpected ways, reassessing one's approach in the classroom, shepherding an individual child toward success, or professionalizing an entire…

"Art Teaching" speaks to a new generation of art teachers in a changing society and fresh art world. Comprehensive and up-to-date, it presents fundamental theories, principles, creative approaches, and resources for art teaching in elementary through middle-school. Key sections focus on how children make art, why they make art, the unique…

Last spring, students from several North Carolina middle schools were invited to participate in the annual Celebrate the Arts festival in Columbus Country. Larry Hewett, a local art teacher, had been selected to instruct the middle-school students. Larry's River Rock Circles project was made as the starting point for the Celebrate the Arts…

When teaching still-life drawing to her eighth-grade students, the author decided they needed a challenge on their final assignment. She thought that making it personal would be more appealing to students than drawing a typical still-life arrangement. She decided to have students create a small collage-style arrangement as a subject for a…