In 2012, Nube Lab was founded in response to the conviction that education in Chile needed a substantial turnaround. Nube--the word for cloud in Spanish--was chosen for the organization name as a simple way of communicating the complexity behind what they do: nothing can be taken for granted, there is something unique in each moment, and what is…

In connecting personal stories with historical and cultural contexts, art becomes more accessible. We have integrated into this article our family stories that connect our personal experiences, historical, social, and cultural contexts with artmaking. They frame their family stories as "funds of knowledge," or knowledge and skills…

Students often have a hard time equating time spent on art history as time well spent in the art room. Likewise, art teachers struggle with how to keep interest in their classrooms high when the subject turns to history. Some teachers show endless videos, with the students nodding sleepily along to the narrator. Others try to incorporate small…

As a new teacher in 2008, the author inherited an awesome advocacy tool from her predecessor, art educator Stephania Crowder, via her annual sidewalk art activity. In this activity, students recreate art masterpieces on a 4-5' (1-1.5 m) scale on the sidewalk leading to the front entrance of the school. This project never fails to garner positive…

In this Instructional Resource, Denmead and Brown consider how "Ruffneck Constructivists," an exhibition curated by Kara Walker at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, can disturb and provoke young creatives and art education more broadly. For this exhibition, Walker draws on the figure that MC Lyte…

A book written in a foreign language and migrated to the US along with its author, an art historian, finds a new communicative dimension by becoming a ready-made for art making purposes. Starting with an introduction explaining the genesis of the collaborative project "Access Denied," this article focuses on one of the series'…

In this article, the author examines how art educators can create narrators of art history rather than those who ascribe truth to the opinion of a few. She presents a series of tangible classroom activities that will potentially help art history become meaningful to students' lives. The author states that students have a right to access art…

In 2011 Pavia University celebrated its 650th birthday. This provided the opportunity to propose the Neverland project whose purpose was to overcome the division between formal and informal science education. A number of classes (various age groups) from a group of schools in the province of Pavia took part in the project. The University Museums…

Integrating art with literature and science enhances students' learning and retention. Whenever possible, the introduction of the author's art lessons include a relevant artist, such as Claude Monet. In this article, kindergartners paint a pond and learn how to make water lilies using colored tissue-paper squares. (Contains 4 resources.)

The Dadaists were an unconventional group of artists who used their art to rebel against civilization in the early twentieth century. They experimented with a variety of media and often used machines as themes in their artwork. Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters incorporated city refuse into his collages, including bus tickets, newspapers, cartons,…

James Rosenquist's giant Pop-art panels included realistic renderings of well-known contemporary foods and objects, juxtaposed with famous people in the news--largely from the 1960s, '70s and '80s--and really serve as visual time capsules. In this article, eighth-graders focus on the style of James Rosenquist to create their own Pop-art panel that…

Popular culture is a relatively new area of study in the artroom, and combining it with the demands of a rigorous curriculum requires some thought. Combining threads from several sources was the key to an exciting exploration of pattern inspired by a newspaper headline. In 2006, a landmark case was settled in Austria, which repatriated five famous…

What does an introduction to and engagement in performance art offer K-12 students? In this article, we respond to this question by proposing a lesson inspired by the artmaking practices of the contemporary artist Erwin Wurm. Performance art can be defined as any form of work that combines the artist's body and a live-action event with or…

Long before children enter school, it is their imagination that informs their play. Their drawing, too, relies heavily on their natural, unfettered ability to portray both the world around them and their own experiences within that world, without the conventional boundaries between "real" and "imaginary." Surrealism then, is an art movement and…

What if we hosted a banquet for famous artists and they came dressed in their own work? With this idea in mind, the author gathered materials on different artists from books, magazines, and the Internet. To simplify things somewhat, she only used artists from the mid-1800s to the present. The sixth graders made the artists' masks, placemats, and…