Recent changes in art teacher certification requirements in New York, the state in which I teach, have prompted me to reconsider relationships between language, contemporary art, and art education. New York is participating in the educational Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), a national version of the Performance Assessment for California…

Classroom assessment is a hot topic in K-12 education because of compelling evidence that assessment in the form of feedback is a powerful teaching and learning tool (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Although formal evaluation has been anathema to many art specialists and teachers (Colwell, 2004), informal assessment in the form of feedback is not.…

"What's going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools,…

The "Framing Student Success: Connecting Rigorous Visual Arts, Math and Literacy Learning" experimental demonstration project was designed to develop and test an instructional program integrating high-quality, standards-based instruction in the visual arts, math, and literacy. Developed and implemented by arts-in-education organization…

This issue explores the nature of childhood by offering selections that re/imagine the idea of the child as art maker; inquire about the relationships between children and adults when they are making art; and investigate how physical space influences approaches to art instruction. Readers are invited to join a dialogue that questions long-standing…

This article stems from a story of arts education advocacy in the midst of a bureaucracy that misunderstood the purpose of art education at the launch of a new elementary school. Contemporary visual arts education practices overlap a unique period of change in neighboring social science disciplines, a turn of the tide that involves the embrace of…

Environmental art education is growing in popularity in college and university programs as the arts begin to play a more prominent role in environmental and sustainability education. As this emerging field of study is an interdisciplinary endeavor that draws from the more established fields of visual art education and environmental education,…

In this article, the author talks about innovative high school curricula that engage students through the study of visual art in conjunction with critical study of history and social movements. Just as historians place a premium on locating and interpreting events in time, the visual arts are centered on getting an idea across in a visual form,…

At the James Weldon Johnson Leadership Academy in East Harlem, New York, administrators, teachers, students, families, and community-based artists worked together to create a visually explosive environment that reflected enriched learning experiences based on their multidisciplinary study of New York's history. The Mano a Mano ("Hand to…

The "Arts Achieve: Impacting Student Success in the Arts" project involves a partnership between the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and five of the city's premier arts organizations. "Arts Achieve" provides intensive and targeted professional development to arts teachers over a three-year period. The goal of the…

Reading Improvement Through Art (RITA) program is an interdisciplinary approach to literacy that blends visual art with reading comprehension, evaluated in nine New York City urban high schools. 240 problem readers participating in the pilot program were pre- and post-tested in the Fall 1975 and Spring 1976 semesters. The testing showed the 9th…

Radical puppets are puppets with a social message. Radical puppets encourage creative ideas that lead toward understanding global and environmental aspects of society through the "art of the puppet," a phrase coined by American puppeteer Bill Baird (1965). There is a blending of performance and visual art in puppetry. Through radical…

The article presents the rationale, methodology, and selected outcomes from "More than a body's work," a collaborative, international, arts educational interactive research project. The project, taking place in both New York and England, explored the ways in which young people construct and "perform" identity through the…

Museum education. Aesthetic education. How are they similar? How do they differ? How do they relate to each other? What are their goals? As museum educators working with classroom and art teachers, they are often asked these questions, and they ask them themselves. "What do they DO?" is probably the most frequently asked question of all,…

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…