When used effectively, feedback promotes student ownership in artmaking by encouraging students to inject originality, persist, and improve. Feedback from teacher, self, and peers can also provide students with motivation. In this article, the author explores her students' understanding of the idea of ownership, observes how feedback…

This article reflects upon the development of Connections, a service-learning collaboration between a Research I university and an urban art museum that trains students to work with patient groups from the community using Visual Thinking Strategies. This method of art exploration helps people with Alzheimer's disease express memories and relieve…

With the intent of improving understanding of cuts to elementary arts programs, the purpose of this research was to investigate how one urban school district (Lansing School District in Lansing, Michigan) eliminated its elementary arts specialists. Research questions were (1) What policy conditions enabled the Lansing School District's decision to…

The Baltimore Mural Project (BMP) seeks to connect religious studies education to the growing literature on threshold concepts in order to address bottleneck areas in student learning. The project is designed for undergraduate service courses comprised of mostly non-majors: for example, world religions. Students in these courses often struggle to…

The research presented in this article strives to answer the question: how do we educate for sustainability? I have provided evidence that arts-based educational research methods and major cultural resources provide very rich learning experiences that extend across disciplinary boundaries and can be crafted into pedagogical practices that help…

Purpose: Pre-service teachers start their university study with only a limited knowledge of art and aesthetics. Early childhood pre-service teachers should be equipped with visual arts education and aesthetics so they will be able to direct artistic activities. Elective courses about art and aesthetics raise pre-service teachers' awareness of…

Arts Health Antigonish! (AHA!) is a not-for-profit community organization whose mandate is to foster creative expression for community health and well-being (www. artshealthantigonish.org). Over a four-year period, AHA! programs have engaged approximately 20 local artists and over 2,000 community members through poetry, visual arts, dance and…

The purpose of the study was to explore how a group of at-risk youth in a South Florida alternative high school experienced a freehand visual arts drawing lesson as a learning portal to the teaching of the basic principles of geometry. These young people were completely devoid of interest in and failed to understand basic geometrical concepts.…

This formative intervention documents the emergence of a hybrid activity aiming at student engagement and academic achievement. In this context-bound study, early stages of this activity consisted in establishing PénArt meant to enable high school students with difficulties to start up their own business at school. It involved reaching agreements…

Over the last several years, Tennessee has rapidly expanded the use of student growth portfolio models for the purpose of teacher evaluation. Participation, both in the number of districts and teachers, has increased steadily since portfolios were first introduced during the 2011-12 school year, and we expect that participation will continue to…

Written from the direct experience of a practitioner, this is an autobiographic paper by a contemporary artist that recounts and explores creative and political activism through contemporary art. This article examines the tensions around status: the status of objects, materials and production methods, and the status of people and their drive to…

People are storytelling organisms who, individually and collectively, lead storied lives. Their ways of knowing and responding to the world are essential to understanding the ways in which they think and learn. Children, teachers, and school leaders understand the world through multi-layered lived experiences; and therefore, how we make sense of…

While remaining cognizant of several aspects of current information literacy (IL) instruction methods, including threshold concepts, the author re-created experiences shared by students as she searched for, analyzed, and compiled resources pertaining to the Renaissance. Good IL instruction supports education of the whole person, develops new modes…

The goal of this systematic comparison of collage and drawing was to contribute to the sparse body of literature on the way individuals might respond to two materials commonly used in art therapy. Eight graduate and undergraduate university students who identified as non-artists completed two tasks, one using drawing materials and one using…

This brief article describes how Dawn Southworth, upper school art teacher at the Glen Urquhart School (GUS) (Massachusetts), devised the White Shirt Project to engage eighth-graders in art and society. Each year, Southworth purchases white shirts for her eighth grade students to transform into original works of art. Prior to the culminating art…