This book is about the classroom, the most important meeting place for teachers and pupils in an education building. Individuals' knowledge, however, about what happens inside this space is limited. In many respects the classroom is still the black box of the educational system. To open up this box, this volume brings together scholars from the…

This article is the report of a large-scale, international research project involving focus group interviews of adolescent and young adult members of a variety of self-initiated visual culture groups in five urban areas (Amsterdam, Budapest, Chicago, Helsinki, and Hong Kong). Each group was established by young people around their interests in the…

Making the visual arts program meaningful in public education can be a challenge when one considers how little instructional time is devoted to the visual arts. A challenge for art educators is to seek opportunities outside the classroom for real-life inquiry-based projects. This form of systematic inquiry done by teachers for themselves is called…

Imaginative and attractive, cutting edge in its conception, this text explicates a model for the integration of language arts and literacy education based on the notion of framing. The act of framing--not frames in themselves--provides a creative and critical approach to English as a subject. "Re-framing Literacy" breaks new ground in the language…

Case studies and current literature are combined with spectroscopic analysis to provide a unique chemistry experience for art history students and to provide a unique inquiry-based laboratory experiment for analytical chemistry students. The XRF analysis method was used to demonstrate to nonscience majors (art history students) a powerful…

The purpose of this study is to measure the effect of project-based learning that is used in visual arts course on students' academic success and permanence. The research was applied to students of Hasan Ali Yucel Primary School in the city of Trabzon during the fall semester of 2007-2008 academic year. Among the sample that had been selected…

Manurewa Intermediate students were given an experience only the arts can provide as they collaboratively researched, responded to and celebrated a school mural project. The mural project was initiated by Shane Hansen through the Principal Iain Taylor and coordinated by Dianne Macdonald, a Professional Learning Leader at Manurewa Intermediate…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…

In this article, the author describes how high school and university students in Georgia and members of a small weaving pueblo in Oaxaca, Mexico, collaborated in designing and creating a mural in the central market ("mercado") of the pueblo. A number of lessons emerged from this multi-cultural collaboration. First they learned that using…

The field of community art within higher education has made tremendous strides in the past two decades. The origins of community visual arts programming are ambiguous and traceable to multiple time periods and cultural contexts. However, in contemporary practices, higher education institutions are slowly adopting a greater priority for community…

In this article, the author describes a watercolor art lesson on Audubon birds. She also discusses how science, technology, writing skills, and the elements and principles of art can be incorporated into the lesson.

Blue collar doesn't have to mean drab and dull. At least, not to Troy, New York, historian Mike Esposito, who is a member of a neighborhood revitalization movement seeking to celebrate the people and events that brought diversity, prosperity, and vitality to this upstate New York community more than 100 years ago. Esposito and others invited…

For most students, classes in the arts are more than just a means of gathering credits, they are about getting involved in what the students like, at least for a period. They feel that the classes are a healthy escape, a time to recuperate and do what they do well. In the art classrooms, music studios, and video labs, students feel they are part…

The textiles of Africa are rich with possibilities for art lessons. With their unique balance of color, pattern, symmetry and repetition, they lend themselves to exciting art lessons with cultural significance. Asante cloth--or Kente cloth, as it is commonly known--is a perfect example. These rich, colorful repeat patterns from Ghana are woven in…

This lesson begins with a discussion on prehistoric times and how most life forms have either become extinct or have evolved into something people see in the environment today. Most of the conversation revolves around dinosaurs or animals on the endangered species list, such as the panda or polar bear. The author directed the conversation to…