Abstract visual art is not for everybody. Some people find it threatening, uncomfortable, and often, inaccessible. Understandably, this can result in a lack of attention paid to nonrepresentational works of art in the visual arts curriculum. This article describes an experiential, hands-on, field trip that sought to demystify abstract sculpture,…

Friedman profiles Margy Natalie, 47, who has been a certified pilot for as long as she's been teaching. She owns her own airplane--a blue 1950 Ryan Navion B, has attended space camp and lists four airports as her favorite places in the world. She is one of the two public school teachers on full-time loan at the Smithsonian National Air and Space…

How can information and critique be introduced into an art project? What can art do? How can it position itself in society today? Since art is able to situate itself in new ways in different social and geographic setting, posing and investigating questions through its particular mode of meaning production, it is always trying to invent new forms…

Framed by a "personal constructivist" perspective, this study analyses visitors' use of spontaneous memories in understanding different types of interactive exhibits, the nature and sources of the retrieved memories, and the way that visitors relate an exhibit analogically to memories of previous exhibits. One hundred and thirteen…

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) attempts to profoundly change the practice of museology and the role of Indigenous people in museums on a grand scale. In some ways it is successful in its mission, yet other areas leave room for improvement. This article focuses on the improvements that NMAI should adopt. The author also offers…

In San Diego, California, 800 public school students from the inner city are attending a program called School in the Park (SITP), for approximately one-fourth of their 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade education. This unique program blends rigorous academic standards (formal learning) with hands-on, experiential curricula (informal learning), using…

This paper provides a history of the "Pachyderm 2.0 Project," a partnership led by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMONA), and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The project brings software development teams and digital library experts from six NMC universities together with…

Parent-child "everyday" conversations have been suggested as a source of children's early science learning. If such conversations are important, then it would be pertinent to know whether children from different family backgrounds have different experiences talking about science in informal settings. We focus on the relation between…

This report summarizes findings from the Academy for Educational Development's (AED's) evaluation of After-School Math PLUS (ASM+). This program was designed to help students find the math in everyday experiences and create awareness about the importance of math skills for future career options. The evaluation was conducted by AED's Center for…

The objective of this article is to study the network and virtual reality technologies for developing a virtual dinosaur museum, which provides a Web-learning environment for students of all ages and the general public to know more about dinosaurs. We first investigate the method for building the 3D dynamic models of dinosaurs, and then describe…

This art education resource, designed for use in the Snite Museum of Art, may also be used with slides or reproductions. Black and white reproductions are included for each of the art works represented, along with title, artist, date, and media information. This three part gallery guide presents a brief synopsis of the stories narrated in the…

This guide provides teachers with background information and teaching activities to prepare students for a visit to the Spanish Quarter Museum in St. Augustine, Florida. It is designed to familiarize students with some of the concepts and words they will encounter in the open-air living history museum where interpreters in period clothing re-live…

This book presents a variety of activities that enable students to learn how to identify mammals and their unique characteristics. Designed to be used in conjunction with a tour of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the activities in the book are organized around the exhibits. Some activities are appropriate for use before the tour…

Using identified factors that affect students' musical outcomes, this research study examined how instrumental music students attending "good" rural Appalachian high schools compared to other instrumental students. "Good" refers to those 12 Appalachian rural school districts identified as the best out of 46 rural county school…

This book shows how physics relates to daily life. Chapters included are: (1) "Physics of Fun" (dealing with the concepts of friction, Bernoulli's principle, lift, buoyancy, adhesion, cohesion, surface tension, gas expansion, waves, light, mirror images, and solar cells); (2) "Physics of Nature" (illustrating the concepts of inertia, static…