Art history can be a little dry at times, but the author is always trying to incorporate new ways of teaching it. In this article, she describes a project in which students were to create a place setting out of clay that had to be unified through a famous artist's style. This place setting had to consist of at least five pieces (dinner plate, cup…

This article examines visual culture created by secondary students as part of a larger research study that investigates how youth understand and mediate body knowledge. During a six-month period students created a number of visual artworks, using a diversity of material explorations as a means to think through the body as a process of exchange and…

This article analyzes the few published references to gender variation among Plains Indians in order to contribute to a growing corpus of literature concerned with building a more complete picture of the social and cultural lives of individuals accustomed to these practices. In recent years these people have been known among Native Americans under…

There is renewed interest in the role of arts education in the curriculum of U.S. public schools not only because of the intrinsic value of the arts and its believed impact on achievement, but because cultivating creativity is thought to promote innovation and fuel economic growth. Still, we know little about basic access to arts education. Using…

This paper examines the impact of two approaches to teacher professional development in arts integration--a summer institute model and a model combining the summer institute with instructional coaching. In an experimental design, the intervention trained third and fourth grade teachers to integrate visual arts and theater into reading curriculum.…

Over ten years ago, Tom Barone and Elliot Eisner (1997) described seven features of existing artistic approaches to educational inquiry. Their chapter dealt primarily with written, prosaic forms of Arts-Based Educational Research, or ABER, particularly educational criticism and narrative storytelling. In their concluding section, Barone and Eisner…

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…

Want to teach printmaking on a tight budget? Try using erasers! The size and shape does not matter--they are easy to cut and print beautifully. Have students place the eraser on white paper and trace around it. They should select a design and draw it in the traced space to fit the dimensions of the eraser. It is important that the design hits at…

To be effective and relevant in twenty-first-century learning, art needs to be more inclusive. In this article, the author discusses how teachers can find a good example in Leonardo da Vinci for building an art program. His art, design, and curiosity are the perfect foundation for any art program, at any level. (Contains 3 resources and 3 online…

According to Maxine Greene (1988), aesthetic education is "integral to the development of persons--to their cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and imaginative development" (p. 7). The purpose of this paper is to present the developing sense of self that pre-service teachers experienced through an aesthetic entry point, the 9/11 mural by…

Pressures are great upon public school teachers and administrators in secondary school systems to insure their students perform well on state and national achievement tests. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) puts an extreme amount of emphasis on students' performance on subject area tests. NCLB (2002) requires that at least 95% of the…

Five children with visual impairments received instruction in drawing, using ink and wash painting and calligraphy techniques. A special system developed by a blind Taiwanese Chinese calligrapher, Tsann-Cherng Liaw, was used to help the children orient and refine their work. Children's performance on simple drawing tasks was compared before and…

An approach to early childhood education that integrates visual and performing arts throughout the preschool curriculum--"Art as a Way of Learning"--was implemented in a program (Promoting and Supporting Early Literacy through the Arts) designed to improve the emergent literacy and school readiness of at-risk young children in community-based…

In this article, the author describes the design for her advanced oil-painting class. In this class, high-school students created a self-portrait painting and learned a glazing technique. The author also describes the students' evaluation of the class.

Back in the 18th century, it was popular to give one's lover a locket containing a painted image of one's eye. Possibly this was a way of keeping privacy between two secret lovers. Or it may have been a way of keeping close to the gaze of a loved one while spending time apart. The pendants may have included a lock of hair or other tiny element…