Rather than just creating lessons that result in cookie-cutter art, art educators should create lessons that promote more authentic learning because it fosters students' engagement and helps them formulate their positionality in the world. Through teachers sharing their approach to artmaking, encouraging students to formulate their voice through…

Agency and empowerment in the art classroom can exist at the epitome of how a student explores and defines her-/him-/themself, and then voices that recognition. Merriam-Webster ("Agency," n.d.) defines "agency" as "a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved" (n.p.). Empowerment can be seen…

In teaching digital artmaking in a public high school, a regular challenge faced by students and teachers is overcoming the ways that the software and hardware systems in the lab often fail to accommodate the learning needs of all students. The perceived immutability and infallibility of digital systems and the resultant tendencies of self-blame…

The National Arts Action Summit (NAAS) is an annual event organized by Americans for the Arts (AFTA) that includes advocacy training and legislative meetings. In this article the author focuses on the curricular preparation thought necessary to prepare students to engage in the events at NAAS effectively. This narrative highlights important…

Designing an art curriculum that emphasizes authentic artmaking, empowers students, and elevates their voices--requires rethinking the way that art educators teach. Art educators must develop curriculum and instruction that embodies three key concepts: (1) inspire student thought; (2) assess students in ways that encourage artistic growth beyond…

Art educators can be reluctant to study graffiti with their students, commonly citing that the practice of graffiti art is rooted in illegal vandalism. While this is true for a large amount of graffiti, today, graffiti art is also often completely legal in the form of murals, commissioned pieces, works in galleries, billboards, logo designs, and…

This article explores two teaching approaches available to art education teachers: arranging curricula based on big ideas found in postmodern artists' work and practice, and/or adopting a choice-based studio model. The author considers the role that offering students choice (and fundamentally, shared power) plays in each of these approaches. As a…

In this article, the author describes a choice-based art unit she designed for her 7th-grade students, discussing how choice impacted student motivation and how this relates to playful exploration, meaning making, and sharing. With the implementation of a personally meaningful found-object unit, students' motivation increased because of the…

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 by the United Nations includes Article 19, which protects the "right to freedom of opinion and expression" and the right to "impart information and ideas through any media" (UN General Assembly, 1948, art. 19), which are qualities inherent to artistic creativity as a human…

Do social justice issues get swept under the rug due to formal curriculum demands and discomfort with topics such as racism, sexism, and homophobia? In the United States, 50.5% of students are students of color (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2017) and by the year 2026, students of color will represent 55% of all students (National…

Developing students' understanding and fluency of the visual arts is one of the central goals of arts education for all students, regardless of grade level (Consortium of National Arts Education Associations, 1994). Yet, as many educators and arts advocates are quick to point out, the arts have consistently been cut from educational budgets and…

PostSecret (www.postsecret.com) is a transitional space where the in-betweenness of public and private exists. Within this space, peer public pedagogy occurs through critical participatory democratic interactions of community participants. Integrating PostSecret into the art education curriculum can offer the potential for generative knowledge…

Paraprofessionals are among the 650,000 people supervised by certified professionals who support students with disabilities as determined by a student's Individual Education Plan (IEP). While there is a growing body of literature that examines the role of paraprofessionals in the general classroom, there is little information about the role of the…

Although virtually all contemporary art teachers list "enhancing creativity" as a key desired outcome of their programs, analysis of lesson plans used in schools suggests that in practice very little curriculum is specifically geared to developing creative abilities. In this paper, the author describes how she developed the curriculum…

Making the visual arts program meaningful in public education can be a challenge when one considers how little instructional time is devoted to the visual arts. A challenge for art educators is to seek opportunities outside the classroom for real-life inquiry-based projects. This form of systematic inquiry done by teachers for themselves is called…