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…

In this extract from, and commentary on, my master's thesis, "The Brooch of Bergen Belsen: A Journey of Historiographic Poiesis" (winning York University Department of Education Best Major Research Paper 2010), I explore a single aesthetic experience, an encounter with a small hand-made floral cloth brooch donated to the Holocaust…

The arts have played powerful utilitarian roles for individuals and for the societies in which they live for millennia. For the last 250 years, though, "art for art's sake" -- the notion that commercial, utilitarian, moral, or didactic functions are distractions from art's ineffable, intrinsic value as an expression of the artists'…

This article examines the pervasive influence of progressive education and travel on a public school kindergarten teacher's professional life. In a statement included in her handwritten list of goals for the children in her classroom, she echoed John Dewey, noting that a kindergarten child should "....live life fully and well because this is a…

Fifteen sixteen-year-old Fenno-Swedish compulsory school pupils' descriptions and evaluations of significant, i.e. more or less "strong", experiences relating to dramatic art (film, theatre) were analysed and compared with reported experiences in other aesthetic areas (music, nature etc.). The drama area was represented in many…

This survey represents a preliminary step toward demonstrating the diversity of motivations and circumstances that characterize cultural participation. This report examines only live attendance. The evidence presented in this report indicates the pressing need for additional analyses that make diversity a central facet of examining other…