In this article, the author argues that visual culture is an essential direction for contemporary art educators who are committed to examining social justice issues and fostering democratic principles through their teaching. The study explores how visual culture education can empower students to perceive and meaningfully engage in the ideological…

In this article, the author relates how she and other art teachers developed a "living painting" lesson, an art lesson that incorporates art history and painting. The lesson was developed also in part to help new student-teachers plan a memorable lesson. With the living painting lesson, students will have to choose and recreate famous paintings…

To encourage creative thinking, high school teacher Kelly Courtney-Smith asked her students for creative responses to Hesse's novel, using a technique she learned from coauthor Michael Angelotti. Students painted or wrote poems interpreting their reading, then responded to the creations of their classmates. The students found that these…

There are many interpretations for the symbols that are seen in rock art, but no decoding key has ever been discovered. This article describes one classroom's experiences with a lesson on rock art--making their rock art and developing their own personal symbols. This lesson allowed for creativity, while giving an opportunity for integration…

Students analyze common characteristics of visual arts evident across time and among cultural/ethnic groups to formulate analyses, evaluations, and interpretations of meaning. One challenge in teaching tenth grade students who come from very diverse backgrounds is how to introduce them to a variety of artists within a five-month semester system.…

This article examines the authors' experiences living action research through an art therapy activity known as YaYa that involved creating and sharing visual representations of themselves as beginning researchers. This activity was part of a graduate course on education action research and students in the course found the activity transformative.…

Opportunities for college students of art and design to study fundamentals of visual aesthetics, integrity of form, and principles of composition are limited today by a number of factors. With the well-documented prominence of postmodern critical theory in the world of contemporary art, the study of aesthetic fundamentals is largely subordinated…

The intention of this paper is two-fold. First, it makes explicit a little known and poorly understood area of human experience: transgender. Second, it explores curriculum possibilities opened up by recent legitimating of transgender people through the Gender Recognition Act (2004). The Act foregrounds the necessity for a forum in schools to…

Since the dawn of time, human imagination has resulted in creating extensions of self (that is, tools) as a means to overcome obstacles produced by genetic limits. Whether the tool extends thought or sense; whether the tool is organic, such as language, or inorganic; and whether electronic, digital, or analog, the artist plies the science or…

Each school year, the author's intermediate art students look forward to this unique self-portrait assignment. Chuck Close's photorealistic portraits are the inspiration for this assignment. The lesson incorporates technology using digital cameras and an image-manipulation computer program. The lesson is introduced with a brief overview of Chuck…

This article explores how using the creative arts in teaching in higher education can engage and empower individuals who learn in different ways, and who may have been excluded from traditional forms of learning which value cognitive and verbal means of learning and assessment. Drawing on an evaluation of a creative arts module in higher…

The Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-1669) left behind the largest series of self-portraits in the history of art. These paintings were produced over a period of time from age 22 years until just a few months before Rembrandt's death at age 63. This series gives us a unique opportunity to explore the development, maturity, and aging of the artist.…

In this scoping study we have investigated the integration of subject-specific software into the structure of visual communications courses. There is a view that the response within visual communications courses to the rapid developments in technology has been linked to necessity rather than by design. Through perceptions of staff with day-to-day…

"Art practice as research" casts artmaking as inquiry--as a particularly experiential and constructivist process of learning in which imaginative synthesis and creative image making are ways of constructing knowledge. This article explores how artmaking functions as research through the creation of visual images, especially images that picture…

Media, particularly in the form of broadcast television, has revolutionized an individual's relationship to culture and cultural practices. This anthology examines the complex set of relationships between art forms, popular cultural practices (including watching television), technology, and audiences. Focus is upon visual arts and artists, and…