This article examines how specialist music secondary schools in England present themselves on their websites and social media platforms. We consider visual communication codes and how such patterns reflect cultural distinctions and social boundaries. Multimodal critical discourse analysis is used to demonstrate how the choice of semiotic resources…

This article reports findings from a study using arts-based and embodied (ABE) approaches to enhancing capacity for distributed leadership and explores the professional learning which took place as a result. The data reported in the article are from the UK research which formed part of the ENABLES (European Arts-Based Development of Distributed…

This paper responds directly to the question, how do we communicate our philosophy of art education? It does this by drawing upon previous research with "House of Imagination, School Without Walls" and doctoral research exploring children's learning identity as artists, to illuminate a philosophical approach to art education and its…

This paper uses a Gwen Harwood poem to open up questions of "knowing" around the teaching of Literature. Following our own brief reading of the poem, we particularly discuss ways in which questions of knowing/knowledge have been considered in Literature teaching historically, such as: - the binary of "knowledge" and…

This paper is a re-examination of Louise Rosenblatt's seminal work of reader-response theory, The Reader, The Text, The Poem. I argue that poems are essentially social in nature and that they open up a space in which conversation and interpretation can take place. With Rosenblatt I argue that until a reader engages with a poem, bringing to it a…

Research involving children, deemed to have difficulties with conventional means of communication, can perpetuate reductive forms of representation of children's knowledges and experiences. This article focuses on the possibilities and opportunities that visual and creative methods can offer to researching with children. Children advance their…

Elevation is the emotion elicited by witnessing acts of moral beauty and may be framed as the opposite of disgust. Two studies investigated the role of elevation in moral judgment and its relation to disgust. In Study 1 it was investigated whether elevation can attenuate the effects of disgust on moral transgression judgments. Participants were…

This article seeks to investigate art in public urban space via a process of activating aesthetics as a way of enhancing pedagogies of engagement. It does this firstly by addressing the question of aesthetics in Enlightenment and twentieth-century frames; then it seeks to understand how artworks may be approached ontologically and…

This paper explores the processes behind drawing different kinds of inference from a single short film. It examines the range knowledge that groups of viewers are able to derive from listening to film sound, and from summarizing the work of a whole film, using the concepts of "aesthetic" and "efferent" reading set out by Louise…

This article is written in response to widespread concerns about the inadequacy of the school curriculum in England, and the urgent need to rethink what public education should involve. It builds on earlier contributions in FORUM and elsewhere by discussing curricular opportunities arising from Labour's proposal for a National Education Service.…

This article explores young people's home literacy practices drawing on an ethnographic study of writing in the home of a British Asian family living in northern England. The theoretical framework comes from the New Literacy Studies, and aesthetic and literary theory. It applies an ethnographic methodology together with an engaged approach to…

This article is based upon research into a participatory Theatre in Education (TiE) programme that toured the West Midlands in 2009, funded by the UK's PREVENT initiative intended to counter the radicalisation of young British nationals by extremist political groups. The article provides a summary of the TiE programme and then presents…

Openness to experience is the broadest personality domain of the Big Five, including a mix of traits relating to intellectual curiosity, intellectual interests, perceived intelligence, imagination, creativity, artistic and aesthetic interests, emotional and fantasy richness, and unconventionality. Likewise, creative achievement is a broad…

This paper presents a best-practice model for the redesign of virtual learning environments (VLEs) within creative arts to augment blended learning. In considering a blended learning best-practice model, three factors should be considered: the conscious and active human intervention, good learning design and pedagogical input, and the sensitive…

This paper reports on the role of the narrative arts in young people's political subjectivity and democratic learning. Drawing on theoretical insights into the process of subjectification and the relationship between politics and aesthetics, the paper discusses a number of findings from an empirical research project carried out with young people…