Loss, impermanence, and death are facts of life difficult to face squarely. Our own mortality and that of loved ones feels painful and threatening, the mortality of the biosphere unthinkable. Consequently, we do our best to dodge these thoughts, and the current globalizing culture supports and colludes in our evasiveness. Even environmental…

Because drawing with a pencil is a basic but often ignored or underestimated rendering skill, we offered a didactic aid--the teaching artist's monochrome picture book--to elementary school third graders for their visual art classes (N = 25, between 8 and 9 years of age). On the basis of the created works of visual art and the transcribed…

Resources for teaching in higher education have undergone a tremendous evolution during the past several decades. The Internet and commercial services, such as YouTube and Google, have revolutionized the manner by which students and faculty access information to both conduct research and meet course requirements. This mixed methods study…

The philosophical foundation for teaching art criticism in schools has been dominated by formalist and expressionist aesthetics, while from a practical point of view it has been influenced by art criticism models that emphasise observation and linguistic practices. Instead of asking students to observe an artwork and make verbal or written…

Drawing is one of children's modes of communication which has recently excited academic inquiry in non-Western cultures. It is the means through which children express their fears, desires, anxieties and conception of phenomena. This study investigated drawings by four- to ten-year-old Botswana children in response to the human figure as an…

We report on multicultural education pedagogies that support teacher candidates in enacting antiracist teaching practice. These pedagogies draw from the experience of a 12-year-old child in an art class assignment that involved race and the Mona Lisa. We highlight the integration of practice with reflection as we link structured opportunities to…

There is a current push to understand and address the under-representation of Black folks in physics, and STEM more broadly. This dissertation presents research that explores this lack of representation through studies of identity and practice, premised on an understanding of systems of oppression operating within the culture of physics. This work…

Throughout this article, the voice of the author will weave with those of practicing art educators in order to illustrate the tension between objective and subjective assessment methods. The collages that appear throughout this article were created by students to illustrate their assessment dilemmas and are used with permission to visually…

In contemporary art, many artists have incorporated playful and functional elements into their artistic expression beyond the conventional perception of art merely as an appreciated object. In this article, the authors touch on the movement of art in daily living and explore the playful, functional, and interactive nature of art by Tin Yan Wong, a…

In contemporary visual arts education, neoliberal managerialism has meant that education has become end-product driven. This article builds on a mindset of how to perform an affirmative critique by analyzing relationality as entanglements of subjects and objects, or educational assemblages, in the visual arts classroom. Drawing on visual…

This chapter presents a broad interdisciplinary literature review linking artists' economic precarity and need for but resistance to entrepreneurial skills, alongside colonial histories, structural racism, and hierarchies of taste in arts organizations. These themes are complemented empirically by engaging data from the Strategic National Arts…

Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: What does a safe space in a decolonised classroom mean? For whom is it safe? And at what cost? Must we redraw the parameters of 'safe'? Prompted by a real-life 'n-word incident' in the classroom, this article unpacks the collision of decolonising the…

Some governments require that educational leaders working in underperforming schools create school improvement plans (SIPs) to guide change efforts. Extant research describes two common approaches to SIPs: (a) a "traditional" approach where leaders create a single plan for an entire academic year, and (b) a "short-cycle"…

Physical design studio has been the mainstream method of architectural pedagogy for more than a century. Although the past two decades have brought forth emerging possibilities via advancements in digital communication, Virtual Design Studio (VDS) remained an experimental novelty until 2020. The interruption of face-to-face educational activities…

Living in the anthropocene requires addressing several challenges. New forms of teaching where experiences of problem solving, creativity and innovation strategies are needed and considered important. This Swedish study contributes with knowledge on pre-school children's creativity processes when working on an authentic, child-initiated…