Drawn from Merleau-Ponty's embodiment theory and Vygotsky's sociocultural learning theory as conceptual framework, this research investigated how Singapore adolescent students accrued and embodied meaning with school art. Combining the methods of microethnographic observations and phenomenological interviews to document the process of artistic…

Intrigued by Pillay's (2009) call for writing motherhood into one's scholarship and creating "liberatory intellectualism," the authors write this commentary to encourage exploration of and inquiry into viable metaphors of hands in poo and goo; performing paranoia, suspicion, and constant worry into one's scholarship; and moments that embody…

During a 1-year study, the visual journal of a preservice teacher was explored as an image sphere, or "bildraum", in relation to teacher culture. Artworks created in the visual journal offered an anamorphic perspective on the materiality of teacher culture, tracing the lived experiences of a student of art in the process of becoming an art teacher…

Through an analysis of his lived narratives, the author discusses the formative experiences some preadolescent boys have with nudity/nakedness as well as the initial experiences young male art students and teachers have with the nude in academia. This article examines how heteronormative ideas about sex--gender and professionalism--limit the…

Arts education faces challenges from continual pressure for educational accountability. How should art educators assess inventive and divergent learning in ways that communicate to those outside the arts? The answer matters not only for the development of useful art assessment, but also in securing a place for the arts in public education. Prior…

This article sets out to compare and contrast language and rhetoric espoused by Richard Pratt, founder and Superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School until 1904, and Estelle Reel, author of "Course of Study for Indian Schools" and Superintendent of Indian Schools between 1898-1910, pertaining to the educational philosophy of the…

Art education is a systemic and extensive network within which children, youth, and adults make and learn about material culture. This lecture considers three sites of theory and practice that I see as ascendant in circulating through this network. These sites are sustainability, participatory culture, and performing democracy. I argue that…

The culture of isolation in schools leaves many art educators feeling that they are, in a sense, islands. Working from the idea of an island, I use the geographic metaphor of an archipelago as a means to understand the tensions between isolation and collaboration related to professional development for art educators. In this article, I describe…

Recent nontraditional forms of public art have been described as interventionist, referring to art that establishes its purpose and form through the social exchanges and altered behaviors that arise as a result of its disruption of quotidian patterns of social experience in public spaces. The form of the work is revealed through the contingent…

This article examines the transition of Chinese painting from "literati painting", exclusive to the scholar-amateur or scholar elite--the backbone of the Chinese traditional culture--to a new genre, "guohua" (national or traditional Chinese painting). It studies the role of artistic institutions in this process, using the Shanghai Fine Arts…

Employing Lacanian theory as a necessary supplement to contemporary approaches in art education, this article provides a critique and response to art education discourse around "cognition." This response unfolds in six acts: (1) Unknown knowledge, (2) Unmeant knowledge, (3) Missing metaphors, (4) Stupidity, (5) Symptoms and sinthomes, and (6)…

This quantitative study was sparked by a keen interest in art teachers who practice humor in challenging school environments. Stressors unique to art education can cause teachers to lose heart in such a way that their ability to perform is compromised. To teach effectively, teachers must maintain resilience to cope with stress. Pedagogical humor,…

The "sink-or-swim" ideology is pervasive in the United States society. At research universities, for example, promotion and tenure are institutional waters in which faculty are forced to sink or swim with respect to publishing. Either they publish ("swim") or they perish ("sink"). In throwing faculty overboard, institutions assume that those who…

This article represents a paradigm analysis of the characteristics of arts-based research (ABR) in an effort to reconceptualize the potential of arts-based practices in generating new curriculum approaches for general education practice and the development of the learner. Arts-based theoretical models--or art for scholarship's sake--are…

The decision to participate in visual arts studies in college and visual arts professions in adult life is the product of multiple factors, including the influences of family, community, peer group, mass culture, and K-12 schooling. Recognizing African American underrepresentation in visual arts studies and professions, this article explores how…