Fear and lack of self-confidence toward music teaching are frequently experienced by many Bachelor of Education teacher candidates when they imagine themselves as future elementary general music teachers. Integrating visual art body mapping in elementary music methods fosters a unique opportunity to identify and interrogate musical experience.…

An artist-educator examines her experience through the lens of constructivism. The author realized she needed to develop a plan for the art program at her school that would permeate the community, school culture, and the lives of students. Students needed skills, instruction, and a reason to make and appreciate art. The author developed a plan…

The Services to Francophones sector of the Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF) strives to provide teachers with the tools they need to perform an important dimension of their mission, which is to transmit and build the Francophone identity. "The Knowing One's Community" series explores how school curricula contribute to this objective.…

During a multifaceted classroom-based study, 22 7- and 8-year-old children had opportunities to develop their understanding of visual art and design elements and diverse narrative structures in picturebooks. The culminating activity of the case study research involved application and transformation of knowledge of the instructional foci as the…

Media arts has been familiar to many through television, film, and digital graphics, and often appears as an extension of the four traditional arts disciplines: music, arts, theatre, and dance. As media arts continues to acquire its own unique identity, particularly through technological means, it has been included as a stand-alone discipline in…

This article investigates the process of devising strategy in an intercultural Baltic-Nordic setting. Sixty teacher education participants collaborated on an interdisciplinary artistic production based on Norwegian folk beliefs and wights through an intensive, week-long program called Nordplus. Using this as a case study, we explored how the…

Art has the capacity to engage exceptional learners, regardless of the nature of their exceptionalities. Students who experience difficulty with academic subjects may enjoy visual art activities with which they engage holistically to learn problem-solving skills and interact positively with their environment, including the social environment of…

As political agendas change, the teaching of writing continues to evolve, encompassing different writing practices in an attempt to address the perceived needs for literacy in our society. This article presents the Write Here project, which aims to boost children's social development and literacy attainment through engagement with visual art,…

A recent community wide reading program offers a valuable opportunity for students and teachers to respond to literature by attending community wide events, creating art, and developing relationships with community members.

The aim of this study was to investigate the differences of young school children in the visual preferences of paintings from the 20th century. The study was conducted at 4 elementary schools around Split, Croatia. A total of 200 children participated in the study, of which 87 were girls and 113 were boys aged 6-10 years. Visual preference testing…

Earlier studies using psychometric tests have documented declines in creativity over the past several decades. Our study investigated whether and how this apparent trend would replicate through a qualitative investigation using an authentic nontest measure of creativity. Three-hundred and fifty-four visual artworks and 50 creative writing works…

Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community (United Nations, 2012). In Europe and around the globe, many efforts have been made in order to include people with visual impairments and blindness into the cultural life. The objects and artifacts exhibited in museums for people with visual impairments are…

The possibilities afforded by perzine pedagogies to nurture reflexivity in pre-service student teachers are presented and explored in this article. Perzine pedagogy as arts-based inquiry is grounded in the events of practical life and may provide a learning context for exploring the problematised nature of teaching. It considers how this reflexive…

This article describes an arts-based research project for which my purpose was to investigate how older women develop their skills as visual artists through the medium of drawing in a small group setting. The social construction of artist identities among the group and my teaching of drawing formed the basis of my study in this informal,…

Stakeholders in the arts perceive a disconnect between the visual art curriculum at a university in the West Indies and participation of graduates in the market economy. The role of this university in promoting social and economic development is crucial to the region. Graduates are often left with limited options in which to make a living from…