Many K-12 art teachers have rich artistic backgrounds and continue to be active as artists in spite of the challenges of time, energy, and stereotypes that insist a real artist would not teach. This article describes a research project that examined the educational dynamic engendered by teachers who are also artists. We interviewed and observed…

Four researchers collaborated on this qualitative case study that examined 11 first-year novice art teachers' understanding and implementation of meaningful curriculum. Participants were selected through a criterion method sampling strategy; the subjects were employed in rural, urban, and suburban public school districts. In order to conduct a…

The aims of educating for economic, cultural, and pedagogical purposes have existed since the early inception of art education. Looking at how and why these aims evolved in the early era of art and design education has potential for better understanding how and why design should be incorporated into the art education curricula today. This article…

Videogames represent one of the fastest growing and most influential forms of contemporary visual culture. In this article, the author looks to five aspects of current videogames: perspective, interactivity, interface, narrative, and time and movement. Each of these videogame modalities is analyzed as related to a wide range of popular media,…

The Octagon Mound in Newark, Ohio was named one of the 70 wonders of the ancient world (Scarre, 1999), and yet today, this American Indian spiritual space is occupied by a private country club whose golf course winds around the mound. This article describes Indigenous, colonial, and academic voices regarding mound access issues and community-based…

This article begins with the premise that art education should engage with forms of popular visual culture in the art classroom so that students can better understand, evaluate, and critique the world around them. The researcher argues that studying video art with students offers a valuable approach to critiquing film and television, among other…

This article explores the following question, posed in the call for submissions to this special issue, dealing with significant 21st-century debates for art education: "How can art educators embrace non-certified individuals who teach art in various settings such as craft stores, after-school programs, and community centers?" While the question…

In this graphic representation, two characters/caricatures discuss, contemplate, and fantasize the history of the field of art education, its current state, and future manifestations. The conversation is illustrated around the possible reconceptualization of art education. Through text and visual metaphors, the philosophical beliefs, theoretical…

Although the argument for art as cognition has gained significant momentum since the cognitive revolution, recent scientific investigations of cognition have revealed the import of social and emotional thinking for meaningful, contextualized learning, thereby highlighting the inherent social and emotional properties of artmaking as inevitably…

Artist Ad Reinhardt's 1991 prediction of the "Future of Art" can be interpreted as the condition of art education in 2010. He writes, "The next revolution will see the emancipation of the university academy of art from its market-place fantasies and its emergence as a center of consciousness and conscience." The focus in the fields of art and art…

Although educators believe in the importance of dialogue and dialogic encounters, and often propose to engage their students in "discussion," dialogic communication is rarely used in the classroom. Rather than through relational and substantive conversation, most educational dialogue in public schools is limited to telling, asking one-way…

Schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" under NCLB face sanctions and may lose students to other schools. In smaller schools, random yearly variation in innate student ability and behavior can cause changes in scores that are beyond the influence of teachers. This study examines changes in reading and math scores across Pennsylvania's…

Analyses of data from the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) show how strongly associated the socioeconomic characteristics of schools are with school outcomes. Factors such as the percentage of students who are poor, percentage black, and the property values within a district explain over 70% of the variance in school outcomes. However,…

Chronic student mobility, and in particular the mobility of students from low-income backgrounds, poses a serious yet underdocumented problem for rural schools. This article combines analyses of state-level school district data with survey and interview data to examine the patterns of low-income student mobility in upstate New York, and to assess…

Since the 1980s, many states have initiated institutional reforms designed to address perceived deficiencies in traditional schooling. Most of these reforms involve stronger linkages between employers and schools. In this article, I examine the factors influencing employer involvement in school-to-work programs and apprenticeships in rural…