In the past, visual arts education in Hong Kong was not considered an important area of early childhood education. While the Hong Kong kindergarten curriculum has recently been updated to encourage creativity, there remains a lack of adequate visual arts education for young children. This deficiency stems from the fact that the visual arts receive…

Media installations and performance are potent ways to creatively grapple with critical theories about cultural identity. This case study explores students' use of these arts methods to engage mass/lay audiences about the intersections between theory and their lived experiences of cultural identity. Sixteen students enrolled in an upper-division…

Knowing that vulnerability and risk-taking are both necessary to the educational experience (Willcox, 2017), the author became curious to know what role vulnerability plays in the self-expressive artmaking process, and what could be learned from the uncomfortable feelings that emerge when an artist feels vulnerable. The author also wondered what…

A considerable gap exists between rural and urban children in their mental health outcomes that has continued to grow during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the critical role of school counselors in addressing this gap, we tested the effectiveness of a 10-week, expressive arts-based resiliency program, Resilient Warriors, with 46 rural elementary…

The main concern of this article is to introduce the concept of the authentic gesture as a vital, largely self-determined expression of the child and to make it fruitful for art education. Because of the assumed educational importance of the concept, some hints to other learning areas will also be given. This should be done from a historical and…

Drawing instruction in Ghanaian high school art education traditionally emphasizes observational and technical skills grounded in realism. However, contemporary drawing has evolved to prioritize innovative techniques, conceptual thinking, and process-oriented approaches. This phenomenological study aimed to understand Bolgatanga high school…

This paper will explore the key findings identified in the five arts discipline-specific papers which comprise this special theme issue. Each of the participant researchers have situated Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts within the context of the "Australian Curriculum: The Arts" and what they characterise as its social…

This article focuses on the drawing practice of Andrew, a 4-year-old boy whose work the author encountered as part of a 12-month ethnographic study of children's drawing in a university-affiliated preschool classroom. The author approaches Andrew's drawing as more-than-human, as a mesh of materials, meanings, properties, and processes in which…

This paper focuses on "Pictures for Schools," an art patronage scheme established in postwar Britain by the artist and educationalist Nan Youngman (1906-1995) to sell affordable works of art to educational establishments. Highlighting the use of works of art as a pedagogical tool, "Pictures for Schools" is contextualised within…

Ofsted, the inspection authority in England, has told schools to ensure that all students have access to cultural capital, taken as a canon of music, literature and art. In this paper, we trouble this guidance by analysing conversations with 1447 senior secondary students. The students reported that the arts offered considerable personal benefits,…

This phenomenological study examined how students at a large, urban community college experienced being an artist, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also investigated the ways these students made meaning of their arts experiences. The research design was based upon the model outlined in "Interpretative Phenomenological…

You may recognize her as the formidable Mariah Dillard in Netflix's Marvel series Luke Cage or from popular films like 12 Years a Slave. Alfre Woodard is an award-winning actor on stage and screen, but her work behind the scenes as an arts education advocate is equally notable. As a mentoring artist for the Kennedy Center's Turnaround Arts…

This study utilizes an educational historical narrative research method to understand the unique viewpoint of Lowenfeld toward visualization as a holistic concept in progressive art education. Employing a social constructivist framework, it explores the problem that the emphasis in education on the surface elements of standardized subject-based…

For the past 100 years beauty has been marginalised in Western art and regarded as a problematic notion in a range of cultural contexts. Art educators tend to associate experiences of beauty with passive appreciation rather than active engagement, while researchers of children's understanding of art characterise references to beauty as evidence of…

The article describes a workshop that combines nature photography and haiku poems writing with the use of smartphones in an outdoor educational setting. The workshop's purpose is to enhance the experience of being close to nature by observation and introspection. The participants use photography and haiku-writing as means of visual and textual…