Several preservice teachers are scattered on the floor, looking anxiously at parents and their babies as they come into the room. This is their first day at an urban community center in Ohio, where economically disadvantaged parents come to learn parenting skills while their babies are provided with care. Wide-eyed and reluctant, each student is…

Oliver Herring, the creator of TASK, defines it as: "[a]n improvisational event with a simple structure and very few rules... TASK's open-ended, participatory structure creates almost unlimited opportunities for a group of people to interact with one another and their environment. TASK's flow and momentum depend on the tasks written and…

When used effectively, feedback promotes student ownership in artmaking by encouraging students to inject originality, persist, and improve. Feedback from teacher, self, and peers can also provide students with motivation. In this article, the author explores her students' understanding of the idea of ownership, observes how feedback…

In this article, the authors discuss mixed-media projects done with elementary students in a summer art camp and preservice elementary teachers taking Visual Arts in the Elementary Classroom, illustrating their consideration of how stories carry the curricular potential to bring students' out-of-school experiences into the classroom. In order…

Individuals engaging in recreational pursuits, education, work environments, and many other institutional settings are likely to be separated by age. This common practice is often considered an optimal way to facilitate programs. However, the separation of age groups has created societal consequences. It has encouraged a fear of aging and promoted…

When one walks into an art gallery in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, one sees a predominantly non-Ugandan audience. Visitors to homes of Ugandans, even those wealthy enough to afford art, find typically bare walls. This begs broader questions: (1) What is it about the education and presentation of contemporary art that excludes local…

Art as social practice encourages active, critical reflections on relevant issues among real people in locally situated engagements and with unpredictable outcomes. This instructional resource focuses on art as social practice that puts critical value on processes of engagement over the creation of art products by exploring contemporary artists…

When students feel comfortable in the learning environment and are being given authority to make their own choices about what they want to create, they can create significant artworks with different personal expressions through the form of narratives. Students feel this freedom especially when they are not in the regular school environment where…

This Instructional Resource is based on the authors' current efforts as part of an interdisciplinary project where artists, community members, engineers, social activists, and educators are working together to make positive change in people's lives. Water, as a subject, symbol, and life-sustaining substance, is the focus of their work and the…

In this article, the authors share some of their learning about art, aesthetics, and people's ways of living. They discuss why the renewal of professional learning is important and demonstrate how K-12 teachers can engage in this process by creating a journal of critical inquiry about their own local communities' art, aesthetics, and cultures.…

With increasing emphasis on multicultural art education and integrative pedagogy, educators have incorporated community resources, such as cultural artifacts exhibited in art museums, to enrich their programs. Cultural artifacts are human-made objects which generally reveal historic information about cultural values, beliefs, and traditions.…

Engagement in the arts nurtures the development of cognitive, social, and personal competencies. When well taught, the arts provide young children with authentic learning experiences that engage their minds. To get children to think critically, teachers ought to become comfortable with the problem-solving process themselves. This article…

Why teach art? Answers generated by preservice art teachers usually suggest a range of reasons (i.e.: so that students will have knowledge about art, acquire the skills of artists, and/or gain aesthetic appreciation). It is rare when students recognize that art is also taught in order to experience something yet unknown to the teacher, whether…

Discussed the expansion of perceptual learning and the thought processes that relate our ideas. (RK)

At a time when educators are searching for and providing interesting interdisciplinary programs such as unified arts and related arts, it would seem that programs and projects which relate the child's educational experience with real life concerns are of extreme importance. Stamp collecting satisfies that criterion and its different facets were…