The following is adapted from chapter 2 of "Assessing Expressive Learning: A Practical Guide for Teacher-Directed Authentic Assessment in K-12 Visual Art Education" by Charles Dorn, Stanley Madeja, and Robert Sabol. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ 2003. (Appendices referred to in the following article can be found in the book edition.) In…

This paper discusses the 1997 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) two-year study("Design as a Catalyst for Learning") of how design is being used in pre-K-12 schools. The NEA acknowledged the thirty-year contributions of professional designers who bring their content and expertise to the school classroom; however, the focus of the report was on…

The new Interdisciplinary Unified Curriculum Framework (2001), as declared by its name, is based on the 1997 Unified Curriculum Framework, but a new stress is placed on interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning. The general aim of education remains unaltered. However, it is heavily emphasized that, in this new curriculum, the growth of…

This article draws on chapter 8 of "Art for Life: Authentic Instruction in Art," by Tom Anderson and Melody Milbrandt (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005) [c] McGraw-Hill. Reprinted by permission.Why do people make art? And why should we teach students to make it? At the root of it, we make art to make sense of things, to give meaning to our existence.…

Among art education theorists and writers, university faculty, graduate and some undergraduate students, notions of visual culture are being advocated, played with, and adopted as theoretical frames for preservice and graduate art education programs. In this paper, the author addresses the gap between theory and policy, examines possible responses…

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…

In this essay, the author asks, "What can the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley teach us about arts education today?" In Shelley's time, no one was yet worried about improving math, reading, or SAT scores. Nevertheless, there was an implication in the rise of the sciences that educators were even then beginning to confront: What, some asked, do…

This article provides excerpts from "The Four Ages of Poetry" (1820), by Thomas Love Peacock; "The Defence of Poetry" (1821), by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and "On Milton" (1826), by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Although Shelley is the main focus, the essays are arranged chronologically. Brackets indicate editorial asides; original spelling and…

In arts education, Visual Culture Studies (VCS) is currently at its height, and proponents of it act with all the verve of partisans on a roll. A little knowledge of history, however, should curb their enthusiasm. Academia has a way of assimilating the most extreme theories and pursuits into standard operating procedure, and the evanescence of…

This author contends that it is sometimes difficult to construe exactly what the visual culture movement really involves. To use the kind of lingo that its spokespersons favor, we are seeing a conflict between transfigured factions surviving from the 1960s. During that fevered era, it appeared to academic liberals that America was becoming…

Proponents of expanding art education to address visual culture sometimes mean by this no more than the idea that unconventional kinds of imagery may productively be treated as art. Sometimes, however, the goal is to replace the appreciative and interpretive stances that are conventional in teaching and learning about art with a polemical…

In this paper, the author asserts that current efforts to transform art education into visual culture studies (VCS) constitute a deeply disturbing educational trend. She asserts that, much like the now largely discredited developments in literary studies of recent decades (whose bankruptcy it apparently ignores), this movement aims quite…

"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…

Literary reading is in dramatic decline, with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a July 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The survey "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America" reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline--28 percent--occurring in…

In June 2004, three out of four public schools in Florida failed to meet a new federal standard for school improvement, including one arts school that had earned "A" ratings on statewide tests for four consecutive years (Shanklin 2004). How can so many schools, including "A" schools, be failing? The answer: the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001…