A visual artist and teaching artist considers teaching as performative, conceptual arts practice.

This article describes ideas that came out of two workshops from a statewide Institute in Hawaii, comprised of sixty-five teaching artists, that focused on analyzing best practices. These were collaborative curriculum design workshops that yielded provocative and inspiring theoretical and practical ideas. In the first workshop, small groups of…

Through her years as an elementary teacher and now a university professor in teacher education, the author has developed many creative writing instructional ideas for use with all learners (i.e., elementary through graduate level). Resourcefulness and imaginative thinking proves invaluable to teaching artists' pedagogy in current economic…

In this article, the author looks deeply into the thinking that takes place in the context of bookmaking projects. She argues that there is an additional and perhaps more compelling justification for the inclusion of book arts in the K-12 curriculum. This justification is centered on the learner. Bookmaking is a powerful and holistic means of…

This article is a brief synopsis of a much longer report, "Teaching Artists and the Future of Education: A Report on the Teaching Artist Research Project," which is available in full at http://www.norc.org. The Project, for which I was the principal investigator, was a three-year investigation of the world of teaching artists in a dozen…

This article presents the author's review of the "President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools." In May 2011, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) released a report calling for a reinvestment by communities and schools in arts…

Teaching artists work in a field with a long, rich history, and many roots and strands of development. One of TAJ's roles is to try to make this history more accessible and useful to working teaching artists. In this article, the author outlines the evolution of teaching artistry in the United States.

Dance education provides a language that allows students and teachers to express themselves in new ways and to think through ideas differently. All students deserve the opportunity to learn things in new ways, to internalize information and rephrase it, to understand their world and contribute to it. All students deserve the opportunity to…

No matter how disturbing, it is common to hear "that's so gay" or "you're such a fag" echoing through the halls of a high school, but when the high school is an international school in Uganda, those words have a newfound potency. As an American teacher working abroad, the author often struggled over her responsibility for the ethical conduct of…

Using videoconference, three different groups met to talk about teaching artist practice using the same three convening questions--How do you make art? What communities are you a part of? What, for you, are the connections between your art making and communities?--and the same piece of student work--a short video composed of a series of digital…

This article presents snapshots of an innovative program in which performing actor, musician, and dancer TAs work as substitute teachers. Through STARRRs (Substitute Teachers for the Arts and 3Rs) Program, New York City principals hire professional performers as licensed substitute teachers. Actors, musicians, and dancers bring their craft into…

In this article, the author reflects on the transformative power of arts experience. The author shares the story of her work in an arts-integrated elementary school in Arizona. She demonstrates how drama strengthens the reading comprehension skill inference. She mentions how the students are actively participating in the lesson. They are learning…

Art education can be profoundly important to individual students, to learning collectives, and to our conceptions of what schooling might be. The value of student engagement in the arts as a way to develop imaginative approaches to constructing knowledge has been richly described. However, a less commonly studied component of visual art education…

Although arts partnerships in schools have existed since the 1960s (National Endowment for the Arts), they are becoming more prevalent and may encourage the emergence of a different kind of music teacher. These new music teachers are often musicians termed teaching artists (Association of Teaching Artists). Although teaching artists are more…

The author came to America to learn more, not just about special education, but about the importance of nurturing one's love for the quest of discoveries that constantly lead to other revelations, which eventually give rise to more inquiry questions that bring about reflections generated interpersonally or intrapersonally. In this article, the…