This article focuses on the emotions of 13 and 14 year-old students related to visual art education activities. Our aim is to understand the interference of the students' emotions with the processes of the creation and reception of their own pictures, as well as their characteristics in an art education context. The article adopts a Vygotskian…

This article reports the results of a quartile analysis of the "2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Visual Arts Report Card." The analysis was made from original datasets supplied by the National Center for Education Statistics. It focuses on 8th-grade students who were currently taking art or recently had taken art.…

The purpose of this research was to explore the impact of an online-learning component incorporating peer discussion groups on art achievement, digital literacy practice, student engagement, and student attitude of an eighth-grade visual arts classroom. Participants included 30 students in two 8th-grade art classes. Students in one class received…

This section is full of stories from teaching artists working to clarify what needs to change within their practices and moving toward solutions--whether it's supporting a classroom of learners in new and unexpected ways, reassessing one's approach in the classroom, shepherding an individual child toward success, or professionalizing an entire…

This research has begun to examine how teachers in Maine meaningfully infuse art and Native American epistemologies through visual arts and writing across curricula to enhance student learning and engagement. Teachers explored a perceived new space of pedagogical possibility within visual arts and American Indian curricula as cross-disciplinary…

This printmaking unit will get students excited about geography and history. In this article, the author describes how her eighth-grade students created a report and a linoleum print of a famous "landmark."

Printing, stamping, and rubbings are enjoyed by all ages, and the image-making capabilities of this media are endless and very spontaneous. In printmaking, images can be repeated, overlapped, inked in various colors, cut up, reassembled, and manipulated. Students find these methods to be engaging and serendipitous. This lesson, designed for eighth…

Throughout life, people are faced with the challenge of defining all aspects of their being. Definitions of self can emerge by taking time to contemplate the meaning that saturates thoughts and actions. This process is essential for the unfolding of the future so a person does not become someone who wanders aimlessly through life. Self-awareness…

The seventh- and eight-grade students in the author's art program sharpened up their eyesight and their use of color charts in preparation for an op art project. Op art is short for "optical patterns and designs." The goal of the project is to create and organize line and color into shapes, patterns, and design in symmetrical and asymmetrical…

For the past 4 years the special education program at History University has partnered with a Long Island, New York school district in an after-school tutorial program for eighth grade students receiving special education services or considered "at risk." This partnership emerged as a result of a state improvement grant offered to…

The content of many school lessons is increasingly determined by the requirement to "cover" what is laid down in England's National Curriculum. In this situation transmission or "delivery" models of teaching all too often become the norm. This article records aspects of a very different kind of teaching and learning, and…

This planning grid for teaching visual arts in grade 8 in Delaware schools outlines the following six standards for students to complete: (1) students will select and use form, media, techniques, and processes to create works of art and communicate meaning; (2) students will create ways to use visual, spatial, and temporal concepts in creating…

The purpose of this study is to describe, analyze, and interpret through participant observation the teaching of art to Amish eighth graders in a public school. The description of what and how art is taught by a non-Amish art teacher raises questions of appropriate content, patterning of instruction, strategies for developing perceptual awareness…