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…

The Walking in My Shoes curriculum at St. Thomas School in Medina, Washington, has been developed to deepen students' understanding of their own heritage and the cultural similarities and differences among their global peers. Exploring the rich diversity of the world's cultural heritage and the interactions of global migrations throughout history,…

Walter Smith is a relatively unknown historical figure in the art world, but he is essential to defining adult education's past. present. and future in the area of visual art. His artistic endeavors in America sparked facets of the way art education is practiced today. However, along the way we have lost the tenets of social change which he sought…

Printmaking has always been one of the author's favorite units to teach. The beauty of the subject is that a process exists for every grade level from kindergarten through 12, and in the lower grades, much of what is used can be inexpensive or donated discards. This article describes how fifth-grade students made polyfoam printing.

This article considers the far-reaching potential and the particular characteristics of performance art within the secondary art curriculum. It discusses the means by which an art department has incorporated it into their teaching curriculum at a state secondary school with reference to installations and the work of different performance artists…

In this article, the author describes an art project in which students create their own outdoor environments using a tri-wall frame--a triple-layered cardboard, which is very lightweight and strong. Then the students compose a few sentences describing the scene or place.

The author describes a project that she developed as a challenge for her students and ended up with some fantastic student paintings. The author told her group of reluctant art students they must first research on the Internet for old, junky cars. The older and more junky the cars, the better. Once a vehicle is selected, it is driven into Adobe…

After studying the endangered species prints of Andy Warhol, and viewing several interviews with the artist, fifth-grade students were still hungry for more information about this eccentric artist, who tested every rule and broke most of them. In this article, the author describes a project using silkscreen to help students truly understand how…

The question of whether an artist's use of technology to create art results in a detectable aesthetic difference was investigated in the case of Dutch realist painter Johannes Vermeer and his use of the camera obscura. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated 20 Vermeer paintings on 6 aesthetic dimensions and preferred paintings created with the…

Last spring, students from several North Carolina middle schools were invited to participate in the annual Celebrate the Arts festival in Columbus Country. Larry Hewett, a local art teacher, had been selected to instruct the middle-school students. Larry's River Rock Circles project was made as the starting point for the Celebrate the Arts…

Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was both a painter and a politician. An exhibition of his work at the Saint Louis Art Museum in the fall of 2007 sponsored by Bank of America featured his painting "The County Election" along with its preparatory drawings. In anticipation of the exhibition, the museum's education…