Two mural projects in Brunei offer insight into the specific and universal aspects of public art education and community art making. This article describes how the author used his initiative and experience as a muralist to plan and implement two community art research projects in Bandar Seri Begwan, the capital of Brunei Darussalam. A premise of…

This section is full of stories from teaching artists working to clarify what needs to change within their practices and moving toward solutions--whether it's supporting a classroom of learners in new and unexpected ways, reassessing one's approach in the classroom, shepherding an individual child toward success, or professionalizing an…

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…

In this issue, editor Amara G. Hark-Weber speaks with two practicing artists who teach in very different programs and settings at college level. The first works with individuals who want to make a career out of their craft. Terry Gess is a potter in Western North Carolina who maintains his own practice and studio while also teaching at Haywood…

The Resource Exchange design team met in May 2013 to learn about and respond to a multifaceted collaboration between the Paramount Theatre & Visual Arts Center and Hands Across the World (HAW), a social service agency that serves the needs of new refugees and immigrants in St. Cloud, Minnesota. In recent years a significant immigrant…

In this article, the author talks about innovative high school curricula that engage students through the study of visual art in conjunction with critical study of history and social movements. Just as historians place a premium on locating and interpreting events in time, the visual arts are centered on getting an idea across in a visual form,…

In this article, the author discusses how art, politics, and life intersect in a South African community visual arts studio program that seeks to educate artists as change agents. Artist Proof Studio (APS) was founded in 1991 and responded to the challenge of building democracy in a postapartheid South Africa. It is a community art center in…

This article describes a project in poetry and visual art that leads students to explore metaphor in generative and novel ways. The author shares what she and her teaching partner Ronna Pritikin have learned about fostering brave and joyful student artist and poets. "Be an Artist With Your Words" is a twelve-session residency, in which the author…

The field of community art within higher education has made tremendous strides in the past two decades. The origins of community visual arts programming are ambiguous and traceable to multiple time periods and cultural contexts. However, in contemporary practices, higher education institutions are slowly adopting a greater priority for community…

Studio-based research is rich with possibilities for contributing to the body of knowledge concerning creative processes, primarily because it has at its core the "making" disciplines. Nonetheless, for those who teach graduate research courses, this relative new mode of research can be challenging. In this article, the author discusses the…

This article reflects the voices of the authors who are three early childhood tertiary educators and who have presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Arts Educators Conference held in Wellington in July 2007. The authors revealed many common threads that interwove throughout their individual presentations and made visible an emerging…

This article presents an analysis of Nilaja Sun's one-woman play, "No Child" . . ., that applies the Studio Habits of Mind framework to reveal essential features of great teaching artistry and great teaching. The play conveys much about twenty-first century schools and the policies that control them; about respect, equity, justice, and the lack of…

Schools that bring in teaching artists often look beyond their school walls--to other sources of funding and for collaborative partnerships--to work with teaching artists from the community. For the teaching artist with an expansive vision and a willingness to try new approaches, opportunities may be opening up beyond the typical…

Thinking metaphorically requires a reorganization of concepts. Reorganization is the essential ingredient for thinking metaphorically. The ability to conceptually reorganize becomes challenged as metaphors are created and comprehended since anomaly or absurdity must be reconciled with previous experiences structured differently. This ability can…

Teachers of the visual arts have long considered the importance of how to collect and display their students' work. Throughout history, bulletin boards have covered classrooms and school hallways neatly displaying children's art work. This article briefly summarizes how documentation functions within the Reggio Emilia approach and then discusses…