Throughout the school year I invited children in a Grade Two/Three learning strategies classroom to participate in a visual narrative inquiry. The intention was to explore children's knowledge of community in artful ways; the children photographed and wrote in what was often an iterative process, where writing/talking and photographing…

When children look at works of art they tell stories, share experiences, imagine, and explore. This book provides teachers with the skills, and freedom, to design rich and open-ended art experiences for young children. The author looks at the work of a variety of artists and offers guidance for using these artworks as taking-off points for…

Using works of art with young children is a perfect way to bridge the gap between art activities that are too open or too closed. Teachers of young children sometimes try to find a middle ground by allowing free painting time at an easel in addition to recipe-oriented activities such as putting together precut shapes to create a spider or an apple…

Rooted in graffiti culture and its attitude toward the world, street art is regarded as a postgraffiti movement. Street art encompasses a wide array of media and techniques, such as traditional spray-painted tags, stickers, stencils, posters, photocopies, murals, paper cutouts, mosaics, street installations, performances, and video projections…

What is happening in arts teaching and learning in our classrooms? Recent NEMP reports tell us that Year 4 students are not performing well but that there is an increase in scores at Year 8. This new professional development resource builds on research into teacher practice in Years 0-6 classrooms in New Zealand primary schools. It offers new…

This book is a wonderful blending of methodologies. This juxtaposition of art and literature serves as an instrument for teachers to inspire their students to create, critique, compare and predict, all higher-level intellectual behaviors, while composing across symbol systems. The work contains detailed classroom transcripts of strategies that…

Background/Context: For over two decades, the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities have become blurred, and numerous articles and books have been written about the infusion of the arts in qualitative research as a means to collect and analyze data and to represent findings. Yet these arts-based research processes, although…

This book will be an original and indispensable resource for all who believe in the importance of art in the wider educational realm. Framing the recent "educational turn" in the arts within a broad historical and social context, this anthology raises fundamental questions about how and what should be taught in an era of distributive…

Students from three schools responded very enthusiastically to community design projects. Participants in a summer course on design education created interdisciplinary projects that were taught to their K-12 students during the following academic year. This article highlights three of the many successful projects, offering suggestions for other…

Creating paths for the active engagement of Californians serves as a unifying theme for The James Irvine foundation as it pursues its mission of expanding opportunity for the people of California. Through the foundation's grantmaking programs in arts, California Democracy and Youth, it aspires to a California where opportunities to participate…

Described the development of Minimal Art, a composite name that has been applied to the scattering of bland, bleak, non-objective fine arts painting and sculpture forms that proliferated slightly mysteriously in the middle 1960's as Pop Art began to decline. (Author/RK)

From a series on teaching Afro-American history and culture in the elementary school.