Viewing YouTube culture as a creative, collaborative process similar to animal swarms can help art educators understand and embrace youth's digital practices. School-age youth are among the most prolific contributors to YouTube, not just as viewers, but also as producers. Even preschoolers now produce videos (McClure, 2010). So pervasive,…

This article describes how Paul Duncum teaches elements of realististic-style imagery. The elements he teaches are framing, angles of view, lighting, depth of field, and body language. He stresses how each of these elements contributes to meaning, and shows how they apply equally to old master paintings and today's digital photography.

The formal elements and principles of art are well known to art educators. Sometimes there are said to be seven of each (Gude, 2004). They were devised as pedagogic tools at the beginning of the 20th century and were used to help understand the modernist, abstract, and non-representational painting of that time. They continue to inform art…

Kevin Tavin has boldly gone where few would dare--to challenge the usefulness of one of the most cherished ideas in art education, that of aesthetics. The author believes that three of Tavin's arguments are completely sound: What is often offered as an entirely unproblematic idea is deeply implicated in historical repression, art education's…

Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as popular culture. From ancient times, the rhetoric of emotion was one of the principle concepts informing the theory and practice of all forms of European cultural production, including the visual arts, until it was gradually displaced during the 1700s and…

While visual art appeals to the sense of sight, both recent art and popular visual culture appeal to the whole sensorium, the sum total of the ways we experience the world. Common assumptions about the senses regarding their number, their relative importance, and their relation to one another are problematized in light of recent psychological and…

In defining popular culture as inherently pleasurable, including the pleasures of transgression, the author argues that while art teachers now critique popular visual culture for its often-dubious ideologies, they are yet to come to terms with its transgressive pleasures. Teachers fail to engage with its carnivalesque, subversive qualities because…

Studying imagery, irrespective of the kind, must focus equally upon its aesthetic attractiveness, its sensory lures, and its oftentimes dubious social ideology. The terms "aesthetic" and "ideology" are addressed as problematic and are defined in current, ordinary language terms: aesthetics as visual appearances and their effects and ideology as a…

Describes art programs that were given at several elementary Australian schools focusing on Christmas and Easter. Explains that the programs are based on the accounts of the birth and death of Jesus given in the Bible. States that the programs integrate studio art, art criticism, and art history. (CMK)

While rejecting modernist philosophical aesthetics, the author argues for the use in art education of a current, ordinary-language definition of aesthetics as visual appearance and effect, and its widespread use in many diverse cultural sites is demonstrated. Employing such a site-specific use of aesthetics enables art education to more clearly…

The central claim of this article is that contemporary cultural forms such as television and the Internet involve more than the perceptual system of sight and more than visual images as a communicative mode. Meaning is made through an interaction of music, the spoken voice, sound effects, language, and pictures. This means that even the recent…

Explains that to successfully teach art, elementary generalist teachers need a solid grounding in some teaching-learning strategies for making and responding to art, along with knowledge on applying them to specific grade levels. Describes four strategies for making art and two strategies for responding to art. (CMK)

Argues for incorporating everyday sites, such as shopping malls, amusement parks, advertising, the Internet, and television, into art education. Also argues that everyday aesthetic experiences significantly impact the formation of individual identities and world views and that the dynamics behind the influence of everyday aesthetics will only…

Examines television advertisements aimed at children outlining the implications for the classroom as well as art education as a field of study. Argues that the images presented in mass media offer a challenge to adults related to their childhood conceptions resulting from certain roles, such as teachers. (CMK)

Examines collage as a symbolic activity in early childhood education. Finds that collage is used in a number of ways by young children and, in addition to being a manipulative and expressive activity, there appears to be a general progression toward incorporating symbolic elements in their collages. (CMK)