In this Instructional Resource, Denmead and Brown consider how "Ruffneck Constructivists," an exhibition curated by Kara Walker at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, can disturb and provoke young creatives and art education more broadly. For this exhibition, Walker draws on the figure that MC Lyte…

Murals have become a powerful art form for portraying antiwar, human rights, social justice, and human dignity issues. Educators and artists have conducted mural workshops with adolescents in international settings to educate them about peace, human rights, and cultural tolerance. Learning with murals has been shown to be pedagogically meaningful…

When one walks into an art gallery in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, one sees a predominantly non-Ugandan audience. Visitors to homes of Ugandans, even those wealthy enough to afford art, find typically bare walls. This begs broader questions: (1) What is it about the education and presentation of contemporary art that excludes local…

Facing the era of globalization, culturally responsive art teachers must recognize that students' home culture, including local artistic expression, is inevitably influenced by global forces. They should strive to engage with students systems and issues of globalization and its impact on their community culture and art. In this article, the author…

Visual culture permeates women's everyday lives, affecting how they see themselves, the world, and their relationships with others. Increasing women's opportunities to recognize the power and problem of visual culture and subsequently to create new meanings through visual culture is an important teaching goal of the author. The author considered…

With increasing emphasis on multicultural art education and integrative pedagogy, educators have incorporated community resources, such as cultural artifacts exhibited in art museums, to enrich their programs. Cultural artifacts are human-made objects which generally reveal historic information about cultural values, beliefs, and traditions.…

When displayed in museums and classrooms, Renaissance-era (1420-1600) painting, architecture, and drawing masterworks are often decontextualized from the social reality of the Academy system under which they were produced. For centuries, the artworks of the Italian Renaissance have seduced viewers with technical mastery, exquisite pigments, and…

The discourse of aesthetics appears repeatedly throughout literature in art education and is employed frequently through K-12 classroom practice. This article discusses the use and uselessness of the discourse of aesthetics in art education. Discourse, as used in this article, refers to the specific term "aesthetics," and all the individual and…

Games have played an important role in modern educational methodologies. Beginning with the work of luminaries like Froebel, Montessori, and Dewey and continuing through the Cold War, the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and '70s, and into the present day, shifts in educational practice can be traced historically using the lens of games,…

This study describes the effects of a yearlong, multivisit teen program in a contemporary art museum on adolescents' reflections about art. Our purpose was to discover whether this program, focused on experiences with contemporary art and artists with its metacognitive approach, affected students' thinking about their own artmaking. The…

Teaching young children ways to appreciate art is not the daunting task that it appears to be. At a very young age, children are quite capable of having an aesthetic experience on their own terms, whether it be the delight of mixing different textured foods on the high chair table top or becoming visually engaged with a mobile that is suspended…

In contemporary society, what, why, and how students come to gain knowledge and understandings of art defies traditional boundaries. In part, this is because of the prevalence of many forms of popular visual culture. In this article, the authors present three vignettes that demonstrate the ways in which three young children created connections…

Images with narrative intent are ideally suited for beginning art viewers. As cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen has discovered in her research on aesthetic development, viewers at this stage-children and adults alike-look for stories in art, even when the artist did not intend them. In this first "Aesthetic Stage" viewers are considered…

In this article, we use two studies conducted in art museum settings as a means to discuss some of the opportunities and challenges for the field of informal art education. The first study explores artmaking processes that take place in a children's museum, highlighting the need to consider the social nature of learning in informal environments.…

This article offers an introductory framework for public art that supports an inquiry approach to instruction. "Public art," or for the purposes of this article, "artworks outside museum and gallery walls," is a large and complex subject that lends itself to a variety of categorical divisions. A basic category, for example, includes the various…