One fundamental breakthrough in the field of hip-hop education in recent years is the shift from understanding hip-hop solely as content to understanding hip-hop also as aesthetic form. In this article, I chart the roots of this shift across disciplines and focus on what it might mean for the future of hip-hop education, pedagogy, and research in…

Dewey's aesthetics, expressed primarily in "Experience and Nature" and "Art as Experience", reorients aesthetics from art objects to aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is marked by continuity, especially the continuity between means and ends. In what follows, I will briefly outline Dewey's aesthetics with an eye toward the role of social…

The author has been deeply committed to shaping an art curriculum that offers students a more meaningful and authentic experience. In addition, she has been interested in the notion of students as victims of their popular culture. She questioned the ways in which cultural sources might impact their aesthetic choices with regard to personal…

Despite the importance of understanding children's interpretations of popular culture in the United States, young children's voices have not been sufficiently explored in studies. Moreover, the perspectives of American immigrant children hardly have a presence in studies of popular culture. Thus, this paper explores how young immigrant children…

A teaching artist reflects on his travels and work across the South Pacific and India. He concludes that American culture views art as a commodity appreciated mostly for its personal entertainment value, and therefore judges the outcome of artistic endeavors rather than appreciate the purpose of such endeavors. His teaching experiences have…

Studying imagery, irrespective of the kind, must focus equally upon its aesthetic attractiveness, its sensory lures, and its oftentimes dubious social ideology. The terms "aesthetic" and "ideology" are addressed as problematic and are defined in current, ordinary language terms: aesthetics as visual appearances and their effects and ideology as a…

In contemporary society, what, why, and how students come to gain knowledge and understandings of art defies traditional boundaries. In part, this is because of the prevalence of many forms of popular visual culture. In this article, the authors present three vignettes that demonstrate the ways in which three young children created connections…

Popular media such as films, television programmes/commercials and magazines have become the dominant source through which children learn about others and their world, develop attitudes and beliefs as manifested in media expressions, and formulate their sense of identity. Popular media have enormous influence on children who are constantly…

In the recent decades art education has tried to move away from the trends based on practical skills and techniques towards a greater stress on interpreting and understanding visual culture, created by the mass media. This approach implies a revision of the field of study and a redefinition of goals, replacing the study of art with a study of…

In the introduction of "Performing Live", Richard Shusterman challenges the reader to decide of the book, "Do its diverse texts manifest an individual style, or at least a reasonably consistent one?" In reflecting on this question, Higgins answers, "Yes." For her, the essays in the book, although written over the course of a decade, do exhibit…

A middle ground between two rival visions of art education is explored. One side views the major purpose for education in the arts to be the aesthetic experiences they offer, while a rival position identifies the mission of art education to be the exploration and analysis of visual culture, to help students discern social contextual influences…

Today, "connoisseurship" conjures up images of fusty old men in tweeds arguing over ancient etchings or perhaps the patter of opera buffs as they pass bejeweled into the night. Connoisseurship is neither fashionable nor politically correct. It signifies a focus on works of art rather than issues of power and is foreign to a cultural…