"Appreciation" of the arts grows most abundantly when students immerse themselves in the making of art. In this article, the author describes how she made eighth graders appreciate some of the big names from the art of the past.

In this article, the author shares an activity she introduced to her students. In this activity, students recognize the beauty of their own neighborhood and learn about cropping a photo for better composition. (Contains 1 online resource.)

Teens have issues! They talk about suicide and war. They experiment with drugs, drinking and smoking. Their lives may have been touched by abuse, gangs, or guns. Young people worry about these issues and many others as they work out their emerging identities and race toward their futures. This article discusses how the teachers in Voyager House…

In this article, the author describes an after-school project he reactivated at RHAM Middle School. The author embarked on the Mural Project, which he hoped would engaged students in a year-long cycle to depict just what the seven pillars mean to the social and academic well-being of the school community. What emerged from the project was a…

Today it is necessary to approach environmental topics with students in an interdisciplinary manner to mitigate the environmental damages that the Earth is suffering. In this paper we report an action-research and innovation study aimed at sensitizing students with respect to the care and preservation of the environment through the writing of…

Can art be powerful enough as medium to connect two economically and culturally diverse groups of students totally unfamiliar with each other? The author put this question to the test by introducing a lesson on Madhubani, a traditional folk art from a remote region in India. The author describes how this activity gives students an opportunity to…

Generative thinking is explored in this article by chronicling the development of middle school English language learners' poetry writing through their interaction with visual art. The author explains how art conversations (Reilly & Cohen, 2008) were used to help students engage in dialogue about the topic of journeys and how students' paintings…

In his book "A Whole New Mind," Daniel Pink describes the aptitude of Symphony as the ability to synthesize, or to put pieces together. Symphony is the capacity to see relationships, detect broad patterns, and to create by combining diverse elements together. The artist Wassily Kandinsky exemplifies Symphonic thinking. A pioneer in nonobjective…

Visual arts rarely seem to receive the accolades that are bestowed upon other special subject areas such as music and sports. In this article, the author describes a way in which publicity could be generated for students involved with the visual arts. The mural-painting process provides a creative outlet for students and gives them the opportunity…

In a time when adolescents are continually inundated by provocative multimedia campaigns that coax them to buy more, think less, and do so in a passive environment that provides little to no opportunities for them to reflect on who they are in the world, the author of this article offers one way to engage adolescents and their teachers with a…

In the lesson described, the middle school students had been studying the artist Georgia O'Keeffe and the history of her work. Students enhanced their flower portraits by adding a matching border and connecting the lesson to other subject areas. Students dissected a flower and drew a small diagram of the flower and labeled the parts. This is an…

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…

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.…