The author is a teaching artist. Most of her previous experiences as a teaching artist have afforded her the opportunity to create and facilitate a lesson or an arc of lessons through a residency in a school. She was the "expert" artist in the partnership. The author longs to have a deeper, more fruitful impact on classroom learning. What might…

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 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 February 2010, the author arrived in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria, to teach mural painting at the National Academy of Art for his five-month Fulbright U.S. Scholarship Program lecturing award. He targeted Bulgaria as his host country in his 2009-2010 Fulbright U.S. Scholarship Program application because of its rich mural painting culture. He…

In this review, the author focuses on the pragmatic consideration: How do artists do artistic research? Artistic research in the context of this review is about the connections and relationships among three primary domains: (1) the arts; (2) higher education; and (3) arts education. Broadly stated, all artists do research when they do art--whether…

Since 1999, when the author first started teaching creative process-based dance programs in public schools, she has struggled to find the time to teach children the basic concepts and tools of dance while teaching them to be deliberate with their choreographic choices. In this article, the author describes a process that helps students and…

This case study is drawn from the authors' ongoing international study of teaching artists in dance and theatre. The study takes an in-depth look at teaching artists' artistic and academic preparation in dance and theatre, entry into the teaching artist field, rewards, challenges, and assessment of their work, and their professional development,…

Begun in 1994, the New York Philharmonic School Partnership Program (SPP) gives elementary schools the unique opportunity of integrating symphonic music into the school community through collaborations between Philharmonic teaching artists and classroom teachers in full-year residencies. During the three-year curriculum, students gain skills in…

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…

In a virtual space between nations, children can come together to learn about and appreciate each other's culture--and their own. As the Co-Executive Director of Blue Planet Writers' Room, a nonprofit writing center in West Palm Beach, Florida, the author was one of the creators of an international collaboration through which they taught…

The author has been an art educator at the largest urban high school in Toronto, Canada, for the past six years, and every year he attends his students' convocation. Traditionally convocation is held at the beginning of November, and those Grade 12 students who graduated the previous spring return to high school for a celebration and to receive…

In 2011, the author made the transition from teaching assistant to teaching artist. From 2007 to 2011 she was an assistant teacher at Marwen, an organization that provides free art classes for middle and high school students in the Chicago area. It was there that she began to realize how much she enjoyed helping people as a teacher, whether…

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…

In this article, the author takes a multidimensional and personal look at creative writing work in an assisted living facility. The people she works with at the facility have memory loss. She shares her experience working with these people and describes a storytelling workshop that was modeled after Timeslips, a program started by Anne Basting at…