Several preservice teachers are scattered on the floor, looking anxiously at parents and their babies as they come into the room. This is their first day at an urban community center in Ohio, where economically disadvantaged parents come to learn parenting skills while their babies are provided with care. Wide-eyed and reluctant, each student is…

After living in Cali, Colombia, and getting to know the culture and social life that takes shape around artistic practice, I started to wonder about the kinds of educational experiences that were developing outside of the formal curricula in visual arts educational institutions. I decided to address the artistic practice of a community of artists…

This article presents Aesthetic Experience and Global Competence, a graduate-level online course for educators in all areas, whose development was rooted in art museum education practices. The article includes details on the course, which was built around a series of group inquiries into works of art and literature related to a broad topic:…

To seek a higher level of arts integration across the education curriculum, I investigated designs of teaching through arts activities that would motivate educators to adopt the spirit of "aesthetic teaching." Two different designs were tested, with the second as a continuation of the first. Each ascribes a different educational role to…

While it would be egregious not to acknowledge the dire state and looming removal of art and music programs in many schools today, it is equally important to recognize that individual classroom atmosphere ultimately begins with and emanates from the primary/elementary teacher. Teaching of young children is a soulful experience; it comes from the…

Throughout the past decade, the maker movement has become a cultural force, and maker-centered learning has grown in popularity. At the same time, the arts have remained marginalized throughout the educational sphere and limited scholarship recognizes the connections between the maker movement and arts learning. To explore this connection, we…

In the quest for more effective education, how can direct personal engagement with actual aesthetic experiences--attendance of performances, participation in artistic workshops and activities, and viewing of actual artworks--play an important role? Art educators have a tremendous opportunity to guide students to engage mind, body, and soul--until…

This article aims to examine the kinds of teaching practices that correspond to the various educational roles ascribed to the arts within school curricula. Three teaching approaches are analyzed: (1) "teaching the arts", in which the arts are treated as distinct cognitive teaching subjects; (2) "teaching through the arts", in…

This article focuses on the emotions of 13 and 14 year-old students related to visual art education activities. Our aim is to understand the interference of the students' emotions with the processes of the creation and reception of their own pictures, as well as their characteristics in an art education context. The article adopts a Vygotskian…

Introducing reclaimed materials into the art classroom provides students with unique opportunities to connect ordinary, discarded objects with unique, personal artistic creations. In an effort to better understand this connection, this article explores existing pedagogical precedents that support the role of the inclusion of reclaimed materials in…

This article proposes a way to expand the study of arts education within new contexts of technology and globalization. Drawing upon theories that have informed arts and aesthetic education in the past, the authors suggest new applications for these ideas to ensure that arts education sustains its significance in twenty-first-century society. The…

The discourse of aesthetics appears repeatedly throughout literature in art education and is employed frequently through K-12 classroom practice. This article discusses the use and uselessness of the discourse of aesthetics in art education. Discourse, as used in this article, refers to the specific term "aesthetics," and all the individual and…

Kevin Tavin has boldly gone where few would dare--to challenge the usefulness of one of the most cherished ideas in art education, that of aesthetics. The author believes that three of Tavin's arguments are completely sound: What is often offered as an entirely unproblematic idea is deeply implicated in historical repression, art education's…

Memories of our schooling and teaching experiences shape our curriculum and pedagogical decision-making process in art education when we become teachers and teacher educators. In this paper, using Hannah Arendt's Actor-Spectator Theory, I engage in retrospective critical introspection of my practices as an art teacher and curriculum developer in…

The first purpose of Art Education in public schools, articulated in the eighteenth century, was the ability to shape an imaginatively responsible, empathetic, democratic citizenry; this remains an aim for today, which is hard to achieve. This article explores the continuing tension between this original goal and other versions of Art Education,…