In this article, the author talks about Venezuela's national youth orchestra program called El Sistema whose attributes offer a direct challenge to traditional Western music practices. As U.S. classical music--and all "high arts"--struggle to find relevance to more than the small "arts club" percentage of the U.S. populace, El Sistema proposes…

In the arts-informed teaching and learning spaces, knowledge is potentially produced and shared based on resonance that can involve a whole person. Concerned with educational processes enveloped in relational aesthetics, the authors designed a workshop to reconnect with green awareness, based as much as possible on the methodology that is located…

In their work with various educators, artists, and learners around the world, the authors have been exploring what it takes to collaborate successfully across multiple technological platforms and cultural borders. In this article, the authors describe three international collaborations in arts learning that they facilitated and participated in via…

This article presents an artist-centered approach to thinking about teaching artist professional development. This framework is intended both as a concrete basis for actual workshops and courses and as a scalable concept for more in-depth curriculum for the development of TA practice. The author addresses it as much to working TAs (who are the…

In the language of the collective subconscious the term "pure" applies to both the "pure innocence of childhood" as well as the "pure artistic genius." However, the "pure at heart" come in many shapes and sizes, and the thought of these mingling leaves many people feeling uncomfortable. There is something slightly unsettling about this potential…

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.

What does "home" mean in the context of teaching artistry and art making that happens outside of the school setting? This article examines home as a valuable context and concept for teaching artists. Kathleen Vaughan (a researcher of art education environments) has extensively considered the notion of home, defining the concept in terms of…

In this article, the author relates his experience working for the Department of Education as an "arts content coach" and visiting in rural Alaska's schools. He shares how he is guiding the youths in analyzing the visual elements of stage pictures so that they can create their own tableaux of important historical inventions. He asks some vital…

In this article, the author shares her experience working on a multimedia project with her students. The project creates a context for students to reinterpret space and ethos in an elementary school. It allows students to poetically enter physical spaces and the written word through collaborative observation, contemplation, and remixing.

This article presents the author's review of research about material culture and its relevance to teaching artists. In this review, three themes emerged that may provide a conceptual framework. This framework may offer a base of understanding from which teaching artists may, in turn, be able to situate some of their practices or create new…

This article puts forth the reflections and questions of three artists at People's Light and Theatre (Resident Teaching Artist Sara Waxman, Resident Director Samantha Bellomo, and Producer for Arts Discovery Programs, Wendy Bable) in their ongoing dialogue on the intersection of media, young artists, and theatre-making in the Teen Summerstage…

A podcast refers to an interactive audio-visual presentation. In this article, the author focuses on four instructional design strategies he used in the podcast that had the greatest impact on his students' aesthetic experience with the work of art. The first strategy was developing questions that encourage personal connections that lead to an…

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…