This article explores the idea that teachers, even when aiming to implement culturally and personally relevant pedagogies, are subject to passing on colonial agendas and practices that stultify learning in art classrooms. I argue that even in self-governing, majority non-European societies, well-intentioned teachers can unintentionally perpetuate…

Art museum educators have drawn on contemporary learning theories emphasizing viewers' meaning-making as individual, constructed, contextual, and subject to interpretation. This learner-centered turn toward meaning-making and away from the object and the discipline of art applies especially to young children's learning, which needs to be…

In this article, we explore three Daoist concepts in East Asian historical and cultural contexts, addressing Daoism and its educational significance in connecting with new materialism theory. We argue that Daoism's nonaction, the interdependence of things and concepts, and nonlinguistic learning allow us to expand art education from the Cartesian…

In this article, I explore politics in children's art practices that divert from normalized accounts of children's art and lives, especially those that seek to compartmentalize the child, children, and children's artmaking, grounded on the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Rancière--namely, the distribution of the sensible, politics, and…

Sentimentalism as a genre is known for its association with melodramatic 19th-century novels, such as Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or Alcott's "Little Women." But, as a cultural tendency, sentimentalism can be found in a range of 19th- and 20th-century cultural, social, and political phenomena, with philanthropic and educational…

Zine making involves not only the creation of handmade and self-published books, but also local distribution in zine communities, as well as archival processes of zine collecting in university and community libraries. These creative and communal practices, as part of the intellectual discourse known as zine studies, engender valuable arts-based…

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…

I explore a spontaneous community art event involving pre-teen and teen refugee girls and their embodied experiences at a local café located in a Northeastern U.S. city. Their bodily encounters involved incipient actions--drifting, knitting, and wrist-tying performances--in the creation of a new space within the space of the café. Drawing on…

This article draws on a study with preservice art educators to offer theoretical perspectives on sociocultural narrative pedagogy. Informed by the work of Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, the authors identify three major phenomena that manifest within sociocultural narrative pedagogy: (1) disruptions, ruptures, and breakdowns, (2)…

This article extends a recent educational engagement with the work of Jacques Rancière by linking his meditations on 19th-century worker emancipation to present cultural contexts and media forms. Taking Nick Prior's (2010) notion of the "new amateur" as point of departure, I argue that new media and attendant production contexts offer an…

This article examines the transition of Chinese painting from "literati painting", exclusive to the scholar-amateur or scholar elite--the backbone of the Chinese traditional culture--to a new genre, "guohua" (national or traditional Chinese painting). It studies the role of artistic institutions in this process, using the…

Participant observation of an innovative art teacher's classroom technique suggested that, despite his popularity with students, this teacher did not fully engage his students' attention. His attempt at using cognitive dissonance to bring about attitudinal change in the classroom left many students baffled despite the effort expended to involve…

This experiment compared six methods of teaching concepts of painting style. A practice-plus-verbal feedback teaching strategy (active condition) was compared to a strategy using modeled verbal response (passive condition). Each strategy was combined with three amounts of information: none, artist's name, and name plus style rule. (Author/SJL)

A training series, designed to increase kindergarteners' conceptual and visual perception skills in dealing with texture, was evaluated. Improvement occurred in subjects' ability to describe texture and to use it in artwork, but the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts indicated that ability to form new concepts was not fostered. (SJL)

This study of third graders examined the relative effects, under two conditions each, of two teaching methods: modeling of the contour drawing process and presentation of predrawn examples. Analysis of children's posttest drawings for visual information content indicated that predrawn examples were more effective than modeling as a teaching…