The art of looking is a museum and art gallery teaching tool at the core of the Visual Thinking Strategies, a Harvard School of Education pedagogy initiated as an educational experiment for schools across the United States almost two decades ago. Today, a large number of schools implement this teaching method to increase student engagement in a…

Integrating art (paintings, sculptures, photography, and other types of images) into second language (L2) instruction, can have a positive effect on language acquisition and developing intercultural understanding. As the instructor provides visual scaffolding, learners at all proficiency levels have the opportunity to engage more deeply with L2…

Content literacy is necessary for students to be successful in meeting the National Core Arts Standards in the areas of creating, presenting, responding, and connecting. Art educators can with work special educators to support students with disabilities to develop disciplinary literacy using an adapted before-during-after (B-D-A) content literacy…

This article provides a practical guide for teaching visual analysis to university students. By adapting Serafini's curricular and pedagogical framework for teaching multimodal representations to incorporate self-reflection, I evince how visual analysis can be taught in a writing course and similar introductory courses. Using a photograph that…

Democratic societies require a citizenry skilled in argumentation. At present, the written argument maintains primacy among communicative modes. Because of its cognitive demands, written argumentation is often difficult to teach. A multimodal approach to writing instruction carries the potential to assist struggling learners. This article outlines…

The second semester of the new art education studio art course that the author teaches, which explores the possibilities of literacy learning through the visual arts, yielded an unexpected outcome. The author worked together with the art department chair to establish the fundamental criteria for this course and write the syllabus. The course is…

This article demonstrates how Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) art discussions and subsequent, inspired artmaking can help reach the goals of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, & Technical Subjects (CCSS-ELA). The authors describe how this was achieved in a remedial…

Explicit pedagogy that focuses on visual design and composition principles can affect students' responses to and understanding, interpretation and analysis of images, as well as the creation of their own visual representations. This article considers the why, the what, and the how of teaching various visual elements of art and design to students…

Art-viewing experiences are an important part of the knowledge-building process and require careful planning and unique teaching strategies. One teaching strategy involves an activity most young children enjoy--playing games. In this article, the author explains ways to use games and conversations to introduce visual artworks to young children.…

The arts disciplines (visual arts, music, theatre, and dance) merit and require formal study. Policy makers should support studies in the arts as core disciplines, as specified in the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)," the federal legislation that sets policy and appropriations for public education. The arts merit and…

This article addresses the need to rebalance 21st-century art education for inclusion and integration leading to fuller art engagement in an increasingly visual world. I expand upon the form versus content canon in art and offset the typically predominant use of sensory, formal, or technical qualities in comprehending meaning from, as well as in…

The arts, multimodality, and new literacies studies, each with its own distinct principles, together can redefine literacy and what constitutes being literate. To recognize the roles that each of these fields plays in literacy necessitates a cultural shift in reading, interpreting, creating, and responding to a range of multimedia messages. The…

Including talk about art--conversing with children about artwork, their own and others'--as a component of visual art activities extends children's experiences in and understanding of visual messages. Johnson discusses practices that help children develop visual and verbal expression through active experiences with the visual arts. She offers 25…

In a time when adolescents are continually inundated by provocative multimedia campaigns that coax them to buy more, think less, and do so in a passive environment that provides little to no opportunities for them to reflect on who they are in the world, the author of this article offers one way to engage adolescents and their teachers with a…

A small campus of an American university located in Vienna, Austria, which has typically focused on management courses, seeks to introduce a new kind of art program. Planners developed an art major with a sociological emphasis on visual culture. Students are given a chance to explore the images they are bombarded with every day and to gain new…