Explores theoretical and practical advantages of a constructivist shift from breadth to depth, and from formalism to contextualism, through the inclusion of artists' primary source writings. Believes that students benefit from linking artist's words to their images providing students with another point from which they can survey the world of…

Offers a rebuttal to the article "Does Experience in the Arts Boost Academic Achievement?" by Elliot Eisner in which Eisner wants to restore the arts-based and arts-related ends of art education. Reviews Eisner's research, evidence, and theoretical foundations in order to assert the influence of arts education on students' academic success. (CMK)

Considers how the readers' view of the text can be changed after understanding the circumstances under which the author wrote the text. Describes her personal experience with this using Susan Vreeland's work and life as an example. Discusses Vreeland's experience as a teacher of English, creative writing, and art for over a 25 years. (SC)

Presents an annotated bibliography of sources of links between visual art, music, literature, and mathematics. (ASK)

Describes a lesson designed to culminate a year of eighth-grade art classes in which students explore elements of design and space by creating 3-D abstract constructions. Outlines the process of using foam board and markers to create various shapes and optical effects. (DSK)

Transcribes an interview with Jafar Mogadam, an Iranian artist who paints Persian tiles. Traces Mogadam's development as an artist and describes how he creates his tile compositions. Provides a brief history of Persian tiles. (DSK)

Describes pigments and artists' colors from a chronological perspective. Explains how chemical analysis can be used to distinguish the differences between artists' palettes, identify the evolution of art, and lead to restoration of an art work. (Contains 13 references.) (YDS)

Practical and academic, the interrelationship of the visual and performing arts opens unique frontiers to aesthetic pioneers. Divergent in aim from the historic search for similar tonalities between the Synchronists and Stravinsky or atonal musicians of the 1950s-70s and minimalist painters and sculptors, the present use of the visual arts as a…

Meadow Woods Elementary in Orlando, Florida has a garden ceremony at the end of each year. This is a time when the whole school gathers together to celebrate another successful school year. The classrooms are built around the garden, so it is the centerpiece of the school. Students always do an art project for this ceremony. One year, students…

Spring Grove Public School is the center of a small, rural community, where most activities revolve around or take place in the school. With this idea in mind, the author of this article describes how, as an art teacher, she set out to create a project that would bring this to the attention of not only the students creating it, but also to the…

Honore Daumier is probably best known as a politically motivated artist. Born in Marseilles in 1808, the French artist lived through one of the most turbulent eras of his country's history. With his artistic prowess and biting wit, he recorded the 1848 revolution, the rise and fall of the Second Empire, the Crimean and Franco-Prussian Wars, and…

This article draws attention to three important aesthetic ideas--ideas which have become, in the early twenty-first century, so widely endorsed in Western culture that they have become the stock platform of much theorizing and teaching about our experience of art and its relation to the rest of life. All of these ideas sprang from Beat thought in…

"A primary task ... is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience."--John Dewey, "Art as Experience" (1934)Dewey's primary task has resurfaced in the visual culture movement and is a…

The Jigsaw Mural Project provides a way for young children to work on a large-scale and permanent mural, in a manner that allows them to work on the floor and without the use of ladders. It is also a chance for art educators to work with students as teacher and collaborator in one. This project took place with preschool children ages two through…

Undergraduate programs across the nation are increasingly offering interdisciplinary study programs as markers of their commitment to educate individuals for the demands of contemporary life. Yet, as students engage in interdisciplinary learning projects, an unaddressed question looms large: how to adequately assess student interdisciplinary work.…