According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2013), more than 29 million people fall under the UNHCR's mandate, which includes "all persons outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and who, as a…

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 integration has been used to explore "the relevance and approaches to arts education connected to [the larger] curriculum and instruction with learners of all ages, including teacher learners" (Cahnmann-Taylor & Sanders-Bustle, 2019, p. 2). Art integration utilizes commonalities among the many components of other disciplines.…

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…

To mitigate educational challenges, K-8 students enrolled in the Migrant Education Program (MEP) at Fuerte School District spend the majority of their after-school class time in a Saturday Academy program completing required curricular tasks associated with structured research-based programs to strengthen reading, writing, mathematics, and science…

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…