Practices such as making connections between topics, prioritizing content, and identifying broad themes are essential to learning mathematics. This paper describes a project designed to integrate these synthesizing activities into an abstract algebra class. Students used a classroom wall to record and organize their collective learning and…

The educational needs of young adolescents require that curricula include a more expanded set of multiple integrative approaches, including new literacies, and that it be "challenging, exploratory, integrative, and relevant" (National Middle School Association, 2010). Although educators are now focusing on the addition of digital formats…

Using visual ethnography as a participatory method that places children's and young people's everyday experiences at the centre of research is discussed in this paper. The strengths and challenges of using participatory visual methods as a way of eliciting the thoughts, feelings and identities of young people within various education and training…

Explicit pedagogy that focuses on visual design and composition principles can affect students' responses to and understanding, interpretation and analysis of images, as well as the creation of their own visual representations. This article considers the why, the what, and the how of teaching various visual elements of art and design to students…

Artists today draw on a range of sources--newspapers, magazines, photographs, film, audio, and of course the Internet--to create artworks that serve as visual "texts" of a specific place and moment in time. Using artworks as sources and understanding how to decode them in the service of "drilling down" into difficult topics can create powerful…

Art-viewing experiences are an important part of the knowledge-building process and require careful planning and unique teaching strategies. One teaching strategy involves an activity most young children enjoy--playing games. In this article, the author explains ways to use games and conversations to introduce visual artworks to young children.…

Many of the paintings of 20th-century American artist Philip C. Curtis defy clear classification. Curtis's artworks often show dreamlike and fantastical qualities and are therefore frequently pigeonholed as Surrealistic. While this classification is not completely erroneous, it fails to acknowledge some subtle differences between Curtis's artwork…

"Mr. President, It is my Desire to be free," wrote Annie Davis to Abraham Lincoln, 20 months after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation affected only those parts of the country that were in rebellion against the United States on the date it was issued, January 1, 1863. The slaveholding border states of…

One hears quite frequently how the arts continually suffer in the academic day. Many long-time technology education champions certainly know what this is all about; but there may be some ways to use technology education to bring the arts into the classroom. This article offers a series of activities and suggestions that will help students better…

Many people have seen "The Kiss" (1907-08), an iconic artwork by Austrian Symbolist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), but know little about its background. Since its creation, the sensual subject matter and lush golden patterns have been this culture's example of romantic love. The painting exemplifies Klimt's brand of Art Nouveau. Acceptance often eluded…

In this article, the author describes a class project wherein preschoolers gained an enriched experience learning art history through engaging in various activities: (1) listening to a storybook; (2) viewing images; (3) doing movement; and (4) producing a masterpiece. The author describes how the children painted their interpretation of Mona Lisa…

Visual art, music and literature, are part of the culture. Thus Art shows the interactions between different cultures. The aim of the article is to present some activities to include intercultural issues in Art and Mother Language classes. Art classes also give the opportunity to do Media Education.

The next time you walk through the local art museum or open an art history book, make a tally sheet of the names of the artists represented. Then sort the artists by gender and ethnicity. What is the ratio of art created by women to that created by men? What is the ratio of Eurocentric art to non-Eurocentric art? It was an experience like this…

In this article, the author discusses how students create their arts projects by responding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In creating their arts projects, students incorporate film, painting, performance, and other arts in their imaginative and innovative responses to Coleridge's classic work. The author discusses…

In his book "A Whole New Mind," Daniel Pink describes the aptitude of Symphony as the ability to synthesize, or to put pieces together. Symphony is the capacity to see relationships, detect broad patterns, and to create by combining diverse elements together. The artist Wassily Kandinsky exemplifies Symphonic thinking. A pioneer in nonobjective…