In the early 1800s, the U.S. President Thomas Jefferson assembled a team of explorers led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to forge a waterway connecting the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. How has this environment changed in 200 years and how do elementary students make sense of those changes? This study looks at the impact of…

What did art education look like within the confines of the Japanese American Internment Camp classrooms? Did the art education in the camps reflect the same curriculum that was being taught outside the camps and what other factors may have played a part in the students' experience? I propose that there were at least three significant…

Art making has been theorized as a way for children to develop the capacity to participate in social and cultural transformation. Yet, little research has been done to examine the role of art making in children's development as participants in society. This study used ethnographic methods to investigate children's art making in elementary school.…

A day-care centre is a place where a child spends most of his/her week nowadays. A day-care centre as an institution of early childhood education has often been studied from the early childhood educators' point of view or within a wider societal context. The children's voices have not been heard much. The purpose of this article is to describe, on…

This study was designed to identify the roles that drawing played in the process of children's acquisition of science concepts. Seventy pre-service teachers through four semesters from a Midwest University in the USA developed lesson plans on science concepts and then taught them to 70 young children ages 4-7, respectively. This experience was…

Navin and Mark are playing at the computer in their preschool classroom. Like the rest of their classmates, these four-year-old children fearlessly experiment with computer as they navigate through the art program they are using. As they draw and paint on the computer screen, Mark and Navin talk about their creation. "Let's try the stamps" insists…

This article explores the use of children's photography as a method for conducting mathematics education research with young children. Collected as part of a study focusing on the experiences with measurement children have at the start of schooling, the photographs presented here were taken by children aged five and six years, from two Australian…

Reconceptualizing the relationship between a child/subject and the adult/researcher is necessary in order to begin unraveling the possibilities entangled in children's learning practices, particularly those articulated by/through children's drawing performances. This article seeks to expand upon the complexities of researcher/subject…

The cultural components of drawing allow one to consider it a symbolic form of cultural communication. The behavioural and cognitive mechanisms involved in the cultural transmission of symbolic communications are situated in an environment embedded in cultural-historical features that should be taken into account, as they give rise to variations…

Building upon a First Nations circle metaphor this paper explores how employing the interrelated concepts of pedagogy, poiesis, politics, and public positioning can provide a more holistic approach in designing and assessing arts-based projects be they for instructional and/or research purposes. It takes a "postmodern" stance (Giroux, 1991),…

Art is all about the process of exploration. The final results are less important than what a child imagines, experiences, and learns along the way. Packed with a year's worth of art projects kids can create out of everyday objects and recycled materials. From buttons to Bubble Wrap and rocks to socks, the author shows how to plan exciting art…

This is a collaborative lesson written by the authors. The lesson pairs two unlikely grade levels together to complete a touching and unique collaborative project. The collaboration aspect of this unit opened up endless possibilities for future collaborations.

This article reports the results of a study which aimed to examine the development of children's ability to depict loneliness in their drawings. Seventy-eight children and 20 adults took part in the study. Participants were first asked a series of questions assessing their conceptions of loneliness, and were then invited to draw a picture that…

The arts have their place in every facet of a school, and the library is no exception. Thinking beyond traditional definitions, arts education could include teaching creative problem solving as well as continuous questioning of issues and ideas. The media center is the perfect venue to showcase students' efforts in the arts. This article gives…

This article draws from a larger study that examines the multiple literacies inherent in children's drawings. The author discusses a qualitative research project conducted with a split grade one and two classroom in Toronto, Canada. She argues that pictorial images can be read as a form of literacy, where thought is made public through visual…