Approaches toward teaching art in schools and methods of teaching art vary according to the teachers' perceptions of the major goals. As the Israeli school curriculum does not set clear guidelines for art teaching, the teachers themselves are free to formulate their aims, curricula, and teaching methods. The purpose of this study was to…

During the past twenty years, the accountability movement and its attendant testing have raised fears in the arts education community that schools will feel pressure to divert instructional time and resources toward tested areas of the curriculum, such as reading and math (Eisner 2000). This paper presents the results of studies on the impact of…

Defining "curriculum" is difficult, because, as a multidimensional term, it has been given a variety of definitions throughout the years. Although the curriculum field has deepened and diversified impressively during the past decades, it still seems unlikely that any definition will ever fully capture all the meanings, characteristics,…

This article, the tenth in an occasional series on past treatments of major issues in arts education policy from antiquity through the twentieth century, discusses philosopher Avicenna's view that art's aesthetic value bestows intrinsic public benefits sufficient to command community support of the arts. By exploring Avicenna's comparison of the…

One of the great puzzles within the Western concert dance world is why so many artists who create revolutionary works onstage conduct their classes and rehearsals as demagogues. Such teachers are engaged in teaching practices that replicate and reproduce in the dance studio the very power relationships they are often critiquing as unjust and…

This paper chronicles the development and updating of a visual arts education policy paper produced by the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC). The first statement was drafted and approved by the membership and published in 1995. The revision process for the second statement began in the spring of 2003 and was reviewed by the board of…

This article is adapted from the Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education. Elliot Eisner and Michael Day (eds.) [c] 2004 by Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, Mahwah, NJ, and the National Art Education Association. To study art education is to discover and engage a field rich with achievement and promise. On one hand, this comes as no…

Are these halcyon days for arts education, or are we at least in an auspicious or opportune period for the field? One encounters good news on a daily basis; arts advocates and policymakers are actively promoting the arts and arts education. Yet many in the arts education community do not feel that they are experiencing a renaissance period. What…

Music education programs stand to gain important benefits from the collaborative work of performing musicians with specialist music teachers and classroom teachers. To be effective, performers and composers must have their knowledge and skills for education cultivated within the context of their essential identities as musicians. Given…

Arts educators need specific professional development. Generic professional development alone will not work for arts teachers. Arts teachers also need more than one type of professional development as the narratives in the stories in this article make clear. The first music teacher provides narrative support for Bowles's research finding that…

Educational assessment is more than measurement, rubrics, and grades. Its real focus needs to be on learning. Art educators need to pay attention to the assessment of daily learning as well. Everyday assessment of classroom learning is crucial because it provides feedback directly to students in the process of their learning, more than mere…

Aesthetics is the philosophy of art (including poetry and literature), and philosophy can be defined as a way of reflecting and clarifying ordinary, everyday thoughts and feelings that people find hard to put into words. One such ordinary thought is the well-known fact that words have a larger, more expansive meaning in poetry than they do in…

This article discusses disinterestedness and beauty. To apprehend a regular and appropriate building with one's cognitive faculties, be the mode of representation clear or confused, is quite a different thing from being conscious of this representation with an accompanying sensation of delight. Here the representation is referred wholly to the…

The decline in public support for the arts is evident in diminished audience approbation as much as in support by public and, increasingly, private sources. This article postulates that the same phenomenon is taking place with the decrease of arts education in our schools. The author argues that our schools are taking on an increasingly…

According to dictionary definitions, the notion of collaboration is neither simple nor clear. An online American Heritage Dictionary defines collaboration as "to work together, especially in a joint intellectual endeavor; to cooperate, as with an enemy of occupying one's country." The purpose of this article is to propose a theory of…