Ralph Pearson's Design Workshop was a center of progressive art education in New York. However, based on the correspondence courses that he developed, he was able to reach artists and art educators across the United States. Women artists and art educators dominated his courses and went on to play an important role in spreading progressive art…

As I began my first year of graduate school--admittedly, a shaky start of my own--a group of my former students began to struggle with their transition to high school. Upon hearing this from my friend, colleague, and their current theatre teacher (who I will call Ms. M), I developed a workshop curriculum focused upon health for the artist to…

As co-headmaster of Boston Arts Academy, the author tells the stories of two students whose passion and talent in the arts helped them become more successful in academic subjects. Boston Arts Academy accepts students on the basis of auditions, regardless of their previous academic or discipline records. Yet a large majority of its students go on…

This article is a brief synopsis of a much longer report, "Teaching Artists and the Future of Education: A Report on the Teaching Artist Research Project," which is available in full at http://www.norc.org. The Project, for which I was the principal investigator, was a three-year investigation of the world of teaching artists in a dozen…

This article places youth spoken word (YSW) poetry programming within the larger framework of arts education. Drawing primarily on transcripts of interviews with teen poets and adult teaching artists and program administrators, the article identifies specific benefits that participants ascribe to youth spoken word, including the development of…

Boston Common at Twilight illustrates that despite the urbanization of late-nineteenth-century Boston, one can still find a sense of peace and serenity there. This article describes Frederick Childe Hassam's painting, "Boston Common at Twilight." It highlights notable cultural, historical, and artistic elements in the painting and…

This report examines arts engagement in ten key states in the U.S. by analyzing data from the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). It is organized into ten state profiles that summarize key demographic characteristics, the arts landscape, and public participation in the arts. Because the regions profiled here are not a random…