This article explores the possibilities of placing curriculum design in close proximity with participatory contemporary art projects that potentially activate our capacities and willingness to re-vision the future of art education. In this curricular questing we have been drawn toward art that encompasses participatory forms--chiefly relational…

This article addresses how older people understand and engage with contemporary art in the gallery context--whether there is something unique to the art, the format of the visits, the pedagogical approaches used by gallery educators, the social contact, or a combination of all these factors. It also addresses the psychosocial barriers to…

This article reports on an event-driven case study which took the form of a curriculum intervention in order to examine how a class of fifth-graders understood, interpreted and commented visually on the Greek debt crisis. Considering art education as a safe place where students can critically investigate through relevant visual culture genres…

This research project examines how using the visual arts can develop medical insight, as part of a pilot programme for two groups of medical students. It was a UK study; a collaboration between Liverpool and Glyndw University's and Tate Liverpool's learning team. Tate Liverpool is the home of the National Collection of Modern Arts in the North of…

Creative participation in the arts is a complex and abstract concept that bridges the gap between cultural production and its consumption. It is highly contextual and defined through a range of discourses besides aesthetics that concern access and inclusion, cultural identity, socio-political rights, collective working, transformation and…

This article identifies recent, mainly Nordic, research approaches to visual arts education. A concept map was developed as a heuristic tool in order to highlight salient traits and blind spots. Contemporary research typically has its origin either in "education" or in "the art world", with an emphasis either on art "as language" or on "art as…

Drawing from a larger study of doctorates in the visual and performing arts, we examine here the diversity of relations which can exist between the creative and written components of a doctoral thesis in these fields in terms of diversity of naming practices for these relations, institutional variation in guidelines and expectations, and…

This article interprets the repercussions of visual storytelling for art education and arts-based narrative research and, particularly, it approaches visual storytelling as a critical tool for pre-service teacher education. After reinterpreting storytelling from the perspective of visual critical pedagogy, I will narratively reconstruct the use of…

This article considers how primary teachers can learn from the practice of artists in their own teaching of art. Fundamental to artistic practice is the notion of practising with various materials and tools. In the article I look at some children's images, as well as scrutinising some statements made by the painter Francis Bacon. The practices of…

It is a common acceptance that contemporary schoolchildren live in a world that is intensely visual and commercially motivated, where what is imagined and what is experienced intermingle. Because of this, contemporary education should encourage a child to make reference to, and connection with their "out-of-school" life. The core critical…

This article proposes a study of the letters and graphics found in the city, while at the same time opening up unusual spaces linked to the cultural arena and visual geographies for the creation of learning spaces in art education, introducing urban typography for training teachers. The letters in urban spaces can help us reinterpret the…

For the best part of the last millennium collections have been used in universities in Europe to support teaching and research. European authors have referred to university collections as "windows on the university". This article uses the European context to historically situate art collections in Australian teacher education institutions. The…

This article describes a collaborative action research conducted by a lecturer and several primary school art teachers, who between 2001 and 2006 created the Visual Arts Education Web ("iii web") in Hong Kong. The creation of the "iii web" was accomplished through research that employed questionnaires, focus group discussions and individual…

This article considers the far-reaching potential and the particular characteristics of performance art within the secondary art curriculum. It discusses the means by which an art department has incorporated it into their teaching curriculum at a state secondary school with reference to installations and the work of different performance artists…

The City of Richgate project worked with eight intergenerational immigrant families and examined immigrant experiences and narratives through a community-engaged process that employed a/r/tography as a methodology. As such, the research also investigated the extent to which a/r/tographical research could visually and narratively portray the…