At the end of the 20th century, dialogue in art education shifted the goals of art teaching from a primary focus on studio production to an aesthetics and culture driven curriculum. Discipline-Based Art Education and, more recently, Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE) have provided students with a rich background for intellectualizing about art and images, especially those produced by others. For many art students, now presented with expansive academic substance, art-production has become less significant, if not sometimes insignificant in their art classrooms. For others, however, the primary focus is still skill training and the "disciplining of perceptual-cognitive processes" with little attention to the contextual and ideational aspects of art. At their extremes, these two approaches to art teaching address separate, sometimes pedagogically conflicting, aspects of art education, i.e. academically-based and studio-based practices. This article recommends an approach to art teaching that integrates academic and studio studies by emphasizing a third and essential organizing principle: the potential for meaning in student art.