This author relates how she came upon the idea of using an image-editing program to virtually install monumental sculptures into real-life landscapes in her desire to bring technology and sculpture together in her art class. In this article, she describes how she made her class create tabletop-sized sculptures and photographs of digital…

It is time for new ideas and models for art education. Current developments in contemporary art, learning theory and in art education itself demand new approaches and provide inspiration and guidance for change. Each area brings particular components to the table but they all have one primary element in common: a call for art education that is…

Students in York County, Pennsylvania, live near Amish communities, and recognize the influence of Amish culture within their own lives through food, decorative arts, furniture, and quilts. The understanding of the cultural ideas used in Amish quilts, however, is not often explored. Two regional art educators, Trisha Coggins and Sara Little, were…

Instructional strategies make a difference in whether students are engaged in learning and are profiting from their time in class. High schools, technology centers and middle grades schools are encouraging teachers to adopt new teaching techniques and are providing opportunities for teachers to work together to improve their instructional skills…

This article reports how corporations and local businesses can be considered as motivators for the art programs that art teachers create. This industry can provide resources for the implementation of unique artistic endeavors. The art competition sponsored by the Huffines Auto Dealerships to middle and high school students in Denton, Lewisville,…

The article presents activities that tap into elementary and middle school children's multiple ways of knowing by having them visually express impressions and thoughts about music, and conversely, express their impressions of visual art by creating music. Because most children learn through both visual and auditory senses, they may foster deeper…

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…

This article describes a joint effort between a mathematics educator and a middle school art teacher who wanted their students to experience first hand how construction works in the real world. It starts with students designing and building scale models for a large inflatable item in which they display their art and extends to building the…

The author of this article is an art teacher at William H. English Middle School in Scottsburg, Indiana. She and the science teacher, decided they wanted their units on integration and teaching responsibility to the environment to mesh and create a lasting memory for students. The science component consisted of an ecology unit that led students to…

In this article, the author relates how he and his class outlined a plan for a public artwork project to be displayed in their community. The author discusses how he asked his students during the course of making the project to reflect on the following: (1) Who am I?; (2) Who are middle-school students?; and (3) What does collaboration look like?…

Going to the movies or watching Saturday morning cartoons has become a fixture of contemporary American life, but have you ever stopped to contemplate how those "moving" images on film are conveyed to our eyes and brain? The movement that we see on film is actually a series of still images, every image separated from the next by brief spaces of…

This author relates how she used to hate bugs but a museum visit changed her perception about them. She realized that in her panic of shooing insects away, she failed to recognize them as living models of the elements and principles of design. It made her realize that insects can provide an opportunity to teach this important lesson to her seventh…

Visual images create desire. As artifacts from contemporary visual culture, visual images inform everyone about society, telling everyone who they are and what they value. They register subliminally within everyone's psyches and alter everyone's perceptions, sometimes without everyone's knowledge. Visual images seem to keep coming and often…

Because it is important for middle-school students to feel confident about themselves and their abilities, the author wanted to challenge her seventh graders with a drawing problem that would yield a high rate of success. So she asked them to put their best foot forward as she introduced a lesson on contour drawing. The assignment was to draw a…

In this article, the author, an art teacher, relates how she struggles every year with finding the time for every lesson she wants to do with her students. Because of time constraints, she always had to make a decision each quarter as to whether her seventh graders would do an artist research lesson, a multimedia project, or a unit on portraits.…