Teaching artists typically work as solo agents, without the comradery of a like-minded community. After a year of focus groups, teaching observations, and conversations with school and arts administrators, we identified a need for experienced teaching artists to have a chance to reflect upon, renew, and reconsider their teaching practices with…

During the summer of 2016, through a teen arts internship, the author conducted research on some of the contexts, narratives, and activities that shape artist identity formation. The teen arts interns spent mornings engaged in activities such as discussion, writing, and making art, with a focus on art as activism, and spent afternoons as teaching…

Place-based education incorporates local communities into school curriculum, recognizing the importance of local traditions, communities, and ecosystems, and emphasizing content that has reference to community life and local ecology. One elementary art teacher worked to connect place to her own artistic identity and to her work teaching elementary…

Explores Robert Henri's philosophy that art making is the inevitable result of reaching a state of heightened awareness. Considers how art teachers can convey this to students. Examines creative feelings, learning characteristics, and teaching strategies. Concludes that teachers' experience of this awareness as artists determines their ability to…

Considers the process through which a group of teachers enrolled in an art education course established friendships with selected works of art by regarding them as metaphors for their lives. Teachers connected with the art works through religious references, family bonds, formal contexts, and ties to nature. (MJP)

Considers the act of walking as a metaphor for reflection and self-discovery. Examines the use of postcards as art objects and discusses how they can be integrated into learning activities using the walking/self-discovery metaphor. Connects these activities to a process-oriented curriculum. (MJP)