Our purpose is to offer children tasks so they can make drawings as diverse and different from each other whilst trying to avoid imitation. Achieving this goal involves the increase of children's creativity. The paper is theoretically based on the consideration of creativity as the ability to create "something new, original, and in accordance…

Over ten years ago, Tom Barone and Elliot Eisner (1997) described seven features of existing artistic approaches to educational inquiry. Their chapter dealt primarily with written, prosaic forms of Arts-Based Educational Research, or ABER, particularly educational criticism and narrative storytelling. In their concluding section, Barone and Eisner…

This collaborative action research study of pedagogy examines an introductory high school visual arts curriculum that includes artworks pertinent to labor studies, and their impact on students' understanding of the power of art for social commentary. Urban students with multicultural backgrounds study social realism as an historical artistic…

Public art takes many forms, including commemorative sculptures, site-specific works, and collaborative murals. Additionally, public art can beautify an urban environment or raise awareness of social issues. Public works of art are a form of discourse and open conversations and dialogue, helping communities work toward unity and empowerment. Using…

Hollis Sigler was an artist, teacher, and activist. Her works seductively invite us to consider fantasies and challenge to confront the monsters. Sigler's narrative artwork after 1991 focused almost exclusively on issues relating to her and her family's history with breast cancer. It purposefully calls into question the capricious nature of life…

Drawing helps children organize their ideas for expression in story writing in several ways. Drawing promotes the first writing, and this writing becomes the first reading material that children themselves author. Children draw pictures and write to organize ideas and construct meaning from their experiences. Open-ended opportunities to write and…

New designs used by art students are described. (CK)

This article presents sixty ideas for celebrating the arts. These ideas include concepts about sparking creativity among children. A list of benefits of arts education is also included.

This article presents the idea behind Projected Identities, an art activity wherein students fuse art-making processes and digital image manipulations in a series of exploratory artistic self-examinations. At some point in every person's life they've been told something hard to forget. Students might, for example, translate phrases like, "Good…

Although sociocultural theory challenges educators to embrace the social nature of learning, common practice in early childhood art has varied little from its traditional stance on natural art development, adult non-intervention, and the sacrosanct nature of creativity and artistic expression--outdated relics on hallowed ground. Despite mounting…

Kids always seem to like Surrealism and Op Art. This is a fun project that is popular with students. With Op Art patience and attention to details are required while Surrealistic collage needs strong composition skills for the image placement. Often, many images must be left out to create a clean design. Artistic decisions must be based on the art…

Students love the colors of Monet prints. The sunny yellows, misty blues, soft lavenders, and outrageous oranges. Using this as inspiration, Michelle Maroni wanted her students to discover new painting techniques and ways of planning a composition with more spontaneity. In this article, she describes how she introduced Claude Monet to her students…

Twenty-four students in an art class use paper sculpture to produce their own version of Sesame Street. (GB)

In Kathleen Loomis's preschool classroom at the Bennington College Early Childhood Center, the goal for children is not to produce beautiful and expressive artworks or to learn specific methods of working with art media--although those things do happen. Here, the curriculum is built around the philosophy that learning to think and create with art…

This article describes an activity that required students in third and fourth grade classes to create a life-size, standing self-portrait. The idea was not just to create a picture of themselves to display on a wall or board, but to make "another self" that could interact in the school environment. After completion, the life-size portraits were…