In this Instructional Resource, Denmead and Brown consider how "Ruffneck Constructivists," an exhibition curated by Kara Walker at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, can disturb and provoke young creatives and art education more broadly. For this exhibition, Walker draws on the figure that MC Lyte…

Is there beauty in the wall socket that people plug their appliances into daily? Can one find beauty in the grate covering the heat vent in his classroom? The author posed these very questions to her third-grade students. She had the students take a good look at the outlet cover (or plate) on the wall. After thinking and discussing the outlets,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate methods of enhancing kindergarteners' artistic creative thinking and expressive drawing through an activity that involved appreciation of picture books. The study was conducted in a public kindergarten in southern Taiwan, with 27 children aged between 4 and 5. The researcher conducted the study in 16…

Business has many reasons for assisting the arts and numerous ways of doing so. (CK)

Author stresses the need to communicate the values that gave meaning to our forbearers in order to understand more precisely the way we should go, in order to name who we will become. (Author)

Explores the visual arts as a means to develop skills and abilities across the curriculum and nurture aesthetic development. Considers benefits of art for socioemotional, psychomotor, and cognitive development; integration of art into the curriculum; and the role of adults, children's books, and the classroom for encouraging art appreciation.…

Research supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education to the Harvard Project Zero. (DS)

Art education should be concerned with five categories of behavior: starting, orienting, assimilating, symbolizing and completing. Through these behaviors man develops his intuitive structures of comprehension, awareness, openness, and emotion. The author develops a more comprehensive model in rationale than the six models he examines. (VW)

Provides classroom examples of appropriate methods for extending art understanding through discussion. Suggests that teachers can easily foster art appreciation through nondirective means; the children can then select what is important to them and thereby begin to build their own personal store of imagery, which can lead to enhanced learning in…

Children are taught to discover concepts which are common to all art forms through live performance workshop presentations. The goal is "...to encourage children to discover their own aesthetic understanding of academics, of works of arts, and ultimately, of life processes." (Author/RW)

Examines the benefits of art education that go beyond art production to encompass an expansive view of art. Describes a kindergarten project called "Painting with Scissors" that implements this approach to art education. Through it, art became a way of knowing, understanding, and viewing the world; of constructing and expressing ideas;…

This program of studies defines the instructional program to be implemented for elementary and secondary education in Fairfax County Public Schools. The document presents the first two parts of a seven-part curriculum guide series on art. The art program K-12 is designed to stimulate the student's need to create and to express himself in a…

Explains how the study of art history encourages the development of critical thinking in adolescents by comparing Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives with Feldman's stages of art criticism. Offers curriculum-based recommendations for using art history and criticism to encourage critical thinking. (LS)

Describes a specialized school for the arts for high school students. Discusses courses in ceramics, metal working, photography, advancement placement in studio art, and art history. Explains the relationship between this specialized school and the surrounding high schools that these students attend for other subjects. (KM)

More than 300 citations of books, articles, and conference papers published primarily within the last 20 years are listed with brief descriptions. The works include discussions of developmental theory, art education, art criticism, aesthetics, and philosophy of science as well as experimental studies. Research topics cover aspects of cognition…