Visual culture is a hot topic in art education right now as some teachers are dedicated to teaching it and others are adamant that it has no place in a traditional art class. Visual culture, the author asserts, can include just about anything that is visually represented. Although people often think of visual culture as contemporary visuals such…

Did you know that a hummingbird weighs less than a penny? Or that an elephant swims twenty miles a day? These are just two of the many facts that Snapple prints on the lids of their drink bottles. When Snapple first introduced the Snapple Real Facts the author was excited to see that something so trivial was also educational. She asked herself if…

Dr. Wangari Maathai--"environmentalist, human rights advocate, global peace worker, and community builder"--passed away in 2011. The first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Maathai left a legacy even greater than the 47 million trees that her organization, the Greenbelt Movement, has planted across Kenya since 1977. As…

A well-established principle in the literature on learning, which maintains that variability of practice enhances long-term retention, served as the foundation of a summer program intended to ameliorate reading skills in incoming freshmen. During a 4-week period, students received reading instruction in the context of four areas: humanities,…

Today it is necessary to approach environmental topics with students in an interdisciplinary manner to mitigate the environmental damages that the Earth is suffering. In this paper we report an action-research and innovation study aimed at sensitizing students with respect to the care and preservation of the environment through the writing of…

This article discusses a school-wide implementation of an arts-based initiative to address the alienation experienced by linguistic minority parents. In order to assuage the prevalent, although unintentional, practices of marginalization, a group of students and teachers established a platform that enabled shared discourse among minority and…

The topic of innovative curriculum planning piqued the interest of teacher educators at a public southeastern university, where it is commonplace to grapple with such concepts. In this paper, the authors describe a study of curriculum integration focusing on social studies and visual arts. The study participants were university level students…

In this article, the author describes how a visit from a flock of chickens provided inspiration for the children's chicken art. The gentle clucking of the hens, the rooster crowing, and the softness of the feathers all provided rich aural, tactile, visual, and emotional experiences. The experience affirms the importance and value of direct…

Arts resources available on the Internet and DVDs provide a flexible, richly resonant, student-friendly framework for a coordinated study of the connections between the style and structure of Proust's novel and the social and cultural worlds he depicts. "In Search of Lost Time", a product of an artistic revolution as well as a critical…

This article reflects the voices of the authors who are three early childhood tertiary educators and who have presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Arts Educators Conference held in Wellington in July 2007. The authors revealed many common threads that interwove throughout their individual presentations and made visible an emerging…

New Zealand has become an increasingly multicultural society since the 1990s. But multicultural education is complicated in this nation by its position on biculturalism, a commitment founded in its postcolonial history. The finding of an investigation in secondary schools, which showed that national and visual arts curricula emphasize…

Research has shown that a solid visual arts program provided to students throughout the K-12 years increases academic achievement, increases self-confidence and self-concept and provides opportunities for students to tap all their intelligences. However, recent budget cuts and the high stake testing on Mathematics and English Language arts at all…

Arts enrichment provides varied channels for acquiring school readiness skills and may offer important educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds and with diverse needs. Study 1 examined achievement within an arts enrichment preschool that served low-income children. Results indicated that students practiced school readiness…

Each year, seventh graders at Woodlawn School in Davidson, North Carolina, learn about Japan through a compilation of literature, history, and art. They are introduced to a wide range of ideas and materials: they study the Heian and Tokugawa Periods as well as modern Japan, the code of the samurai warriors, haiku and its components, and Japanese…

Thinking metaphorically requires a reorganization of concepts. Reorganization is the essential ingredient for thinking metaphorically. The ability to conceptually reorganize becomes challenged as metaphors are created and comprehended since anomaly or absurdity must be reconciled with previous experiences structured differently. This ability can…