In this article, the author shares a lesson taught to a sixth-grade art class. Using contemporary art, the students were encouraged to observe the art and have focused conversations about the work. When these discussions are integrated into the daily work of artmaking, they help students understand what it is they are learning. The author's goal…

Background: Art making is a personal and social process in which learners make meaning for themselves and audiences through the production of artifacts. In classrooms, this personal and social process is made concrete through dialogue. Methods: This paper presents an illustrative case study of how sixth-grade student, Jo, developed voice through…

This paper engages with Guattari's query about, how to make a classroom operate like a work of art? Guattari's question is not intended to be prescriptive or dogmatic. Rather, his thinking engenders a way of thinking about art as an affective event that has the capacity to invent new relations and new ways of learning. In the first section, we…

The ecological realities of many communities are desperate but not determined. As teachers inevitably encounter these realities in their communities, they can respond by activating students' imaginations to conceive of better alternatives. Greene (1995) outlined how the imagination has the power to envision alternative realities and better…

What if we hosted a banquet for famous artists and they came dressed in their own work? With this idea in mind, the author gathered materials on different artists from books, magazines, and the Internet. To simplify things somewhat, she only used artists from the mid-1800s to the present. The sixth graders made the artists' masks, placemats, and…

Romero Britto is a wonderful artist for young students to study when learning the building blocks of art and design. Colorful, linear, and full of bold patterns, Britto's work blends a contemporary cubist style and pop art commercial appeal. Themes of this contemporary artist's work include animals, flowers, still life, and people in joyful…

For centuries people from around the world have celebrated storytelling and puppetry for their educational and social functions. In the comprehensive curriculum, storytelling combined with puppet performances enriches the classroom experience by providing students with opportunities to engage in open dialogue, creativity, and structured play.…

This book details the Guggenheim Museum's classroom-tested, inquiry-based approach to learning. This user-friendly guide provides teachers (grades 2-8) with strategies and resources for investigating art to enhance student learning across the curriculum. "For the classroom teacher", Art Investigation provides an exciting way to study contemporary…

In spring 2010, the author invited sixth-grade students to examine stereotypes about people living with disabilities and then challenge these generalized perceptions through the creation of comic strips. She chose exploring disability stereotypes because of her personal interest in the work of artists with disabilities. She wanted to share with…

Creativity--where does it come from? When nurturing creativity, it is necessary to have an open mind. By nurturing a creative mind, one finds that artists' ideas flow freely, so students need to look deeper into the artworks, the artists' lives, and what was behind the inspiration for the work. Imagining themselves as one of the artists they have…

Writing about the teaching artist practice should mean writing about art making. As both teacher and artist, the authors are required to be cognizant of their own art-making processes, both how it works and why it is important to them, in order to make this process visible to their students. They also need the same skills to write about how and…

This article discusses Al Souza's "Orlando City Maps," which was created not by adding colored ink to paper, but by cutting the printed paper away. Seven layers of pages are stacked upon one another and, except for the intact bottom layer, oval-shaped holes are cut through each page to reveal the layers below. When designing "Orlando City Maps,"…

Listening to people complain about the hardships of winter and the dreariness of the nearly constant gray sky prompted the author to help her sixth graders recognize and appreciate the beauty that surrounds them for nearly five months of the year in western New York. The author opines that if students could see things more artistically, the winter…

Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923) is that rarity: a famous, living woman artist. In trying to reinforce the idea of contemporary women in art, the author chose to introduce her sixth-graders to Schapiro's work. In this article, the author describes how her students created dancing figures which were inspired by Schapiro's series of "Rondo" dancers.

This article describes a lesson on Schapiro Shapes. Schapiro Shapes is based on the art of Miriam Schapiro, who created a number of works of figures in action. Using the basic concepts of this project, students learn to create their own figures and styles. (Contains 1 online resource.)