The Ethiopian Orphanage Project was the brainchild of a prominent pediatrician who, through her foundation and private practice, has been saving the physical and emotional lives of children for years, both in the United States and abroad, with a focus on HIV+ orphans in developing countries. Three years ago, after introducing ARVs (antiretroviral…

The author of this document spent time as the Associate Artistic Director of The 52nd Street Project, a not-for-profit theater company dedicated to the creation and production of new plays for, and often by, kids between the ages of nine and eighteen that reside in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. Through a series of unique…

Inner-city public school classrooms, group homes, juvenile detention centers and facilities will be with Americans forever. Their populations can deflate, challenge, or improve any artist's skills and expertise. The author thinks of teaching artists who work these strenuous communities as soldiers of service, dedicated individuals who fight with…

This research review is dedicated to the memory of William Safire (1929-2009). A visionary leader, Safire brought other visionaries, researchers, educators, artists, and policymakers together to explore the confluence of arts education and neuroscience. He fostered the new field of neuroeducation in his work as chair of The Dana Foundation in…

Walter Gropius built the internationally known movement and art school known as the Bauhaus between the years 1919 and 1928. This new institution was born by combining two fledging schools: the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts with the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts. In this new academy all media were regarded as acceptable as Gropius sought to…

MusicianCorps is the flagship program of Music National Service (MNS), envisioned and founded by singer-songwriter/social entrepreneur Kiff Gallagher, a one-time White House staffer for the Clinton Administration, a singer-songwriter, and a social entrepreneur who was involved in creating AmeriCorps. Over the past several years, Kiff traveled the…

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…

Traditional art education, like other academic disciplines, emphasizes competitiveness and individualism. Through a mural painting curriculum, learners participate in mural art and history appreciation, are active in mural theme or content construction, and engage in hands-on mural design and painting processes. When mural paintings are produced…

Community development through the arts is a process of creating bridges between people. The education and training for student-teaching-artists confronts them with real-world challenges and the need for sensitivity as they move in and out of many different communities. In this article, the author, an interdisciplinary artist, describes an…

In this article, the author comments on James Catterall's research "Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art." The purpose is to understand how this study frames the argument for a high level of arts involvement in secondary school. By doing so, important characteristics and limitations of social science research and of this study in particular are…

In this article, the author, a poet and teaching artist, shares how he successfully brought slam poetry to College Hill Middle School in Texarkana, Arkansas. In 2001 he discovered slam poetry--a poetry-reading format in which poets compete in dramatic readings of their works--and went to Slam Nationals in Seattle on the Arkansas slam team. He…

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…

In this article, the author describes a four-day teaching artist workshop at North Carolina's Penland School of Crafts. Led by Dr. Madeleine R. Grumet of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, participants of the seminar undertook the pleasurable job of examining the ins and outs of teaching visual art. Their morning was modeled on a…

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…

Mentorship is essential to teaching artists seriously committed to "learning to love this work more." For new(er) teaching artists, with little or no experience as teachers, the New Teaching Artist Mentorship Initiative is designed to inspire a life-long love affair with teaching and learning. This article describes the New Teaching Mentorship…