In "Teaching Critical Thinking," bell hooks (2010) addresses education as the practice of freedom by explaining that we use "our intellect and our imaginations to forge new and liberatory ways of knowing, thinking, and being, to work for change" (p. 170). Speaking to the arts, Maxine Greene (1995) said that "of all our…

This paper explores the declining trend of fine arts education in secondary schools. We examine mechanisms that may explain this phenomenon on structural levels of policymaking and policy implementation in different areas of the education system. What will be defined as the "selection device" refers to the structurally determined…

As Seattle and the United States grapple with COVID-19, police brutality, and racial inequity, a teaching artist, a leader from a youth-focused cultural organization, and a representative from a city agency each explain, from their unique perspective, why teaching artists are essential workers. They also explore the local arts/culture, education,…

2020 has been marked by disruption on a global scale due to a range of compounding crises including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Many community arts responses to the pandemic originated from individuals rather than by means of concerted or sustained sectoral responses. This paper uses reflections from Ireland, Australia, and Mexico to discuss…

While policy formation frameworks are commonly used to understand public policy developments, scholars rarely have used them to reflect on arts education policies. Such analysis is important because it can assist both in identifying the genesis of past policies, including who the important actors are, how issues are framed and problematized, and…

In this article, a music teacher educator and a music therapy clinician and educator discuss special education policy and arts instruction at the district level. To illustrate the gulf between federal and local policies with regard to exceptional learners and arts instruction, we examine the intersections of music therapy and music education with…

Authors and scholars published within "Arts Education Policy Review" have been diligent to investigate various topics surrounding music educator preparation, mentoring, retention, as well as avenues for continued professional development and growth. Linda Darling-Hammond and Robert Rothman, along with various chapter authors, address…

This article investigates the concept of change for art education in times when the waning relevancy of postmodernity has brought about a set of competing post-conditions that point to an entanglement between continuity and discontinuity and to where the Now belongs to a future that is "not," prima facie, New. This temporal…

This article discusses strategies to decolonize the classroom through changes in course structure that place postcolonial scholarship into dialogue with emerging scholarship that seeks to unsettle settler colonialism. This pedagogical approach interrogates the very structure of traditional art history to critically explore how systemic…

This article seeks to explain the disjuncture between the decline of music education in schools and the importance music has in popular youth culture and in creativity within the new knowledge economy. The data discussed in this article have been derived from analyses of major documents on curriculum reform as well as e-mail responses from music…

This article explores the special case of integrative teaching and learning in music as a model for 21st century music education policy reform based on the principles that have evolved out of arts integration research and practices over the past century and informed by the recent rising tide of evidence of music's impact on brain capacity and…

In a national climate of high-stakes testing, there is an ever-increasing need for policy that ensures high-quality arts education for all children. At the same time that arts education in K-12 schools is being diminished or eliminated, there is an ever-increasing body of research linking participation in the arts to various aspects of cognitive…

After 10 years of teaching art in public schools, Carrie Nordlund arrived at a state of query that set in motion her search for alternative approaches to learning. As she was feeling stifled in a seemingly sterile education institution with its overdependence on and pedagogy aimed at standardized tests, she came across a reference to Waldorf…

Over the past twenty years, constructivism, as a theory of learning, has taken on an increasingly important role in music education. Efforts to shift music education toward a more constructivist practice have significant implications for policymaking at all levels of music education. In this article, I seek to recalibrate our thinking about what…

This article examines ways in which music education advocacy efforts have become disconnected from the unified visions and declarations of music educators espoused in the Tanglewood and Housewright declarations and are thus reifying the disconnect between what we value and what we say we value. We first analyze the policies posited by the recently…