Education Commons^™

Happy Faces, Lisa Tucker

Master’s Theses and Projects

“Happy Faces” is a series of sculptural masks which explore the layered facades people construct to hide their vulnerabilities or to please others. Each mask represents a vice; these are the unhealthy habits that allow people to escape their everyday lives and pressures. I have created these masks out of found materials which relate to each vice in question. Through this work, I examine the concepts of escapism and duality. My studio investigation influences my pedagogical approach in the way I interact with my students and manage my classroom, both in how I embrace process and experiment with my use …

Primary Students’ Engagement With The Visual Arts And Their Transition Into Year 7, Zoe Wittber

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Visual Arts education is fundamental to an effective school curriculum for primary and secondary students. It provides students with opportunities for expression and personal growth, essential to a holistic education. Recently, in Perth, Western Australia (WA) several secondary Visual Arts educators expressed what they saw as a significant deficit in the outcomes of Making and Responding in Visual Arts, evidenced in their Year 7 students who had recently graduated from primary school. Consequently, this research investigated the extent of Year 7 students’ prior Visual Arts experiences upon entry into secondary school.

The research engaged a qualitative research approach to gather …

Arts Integration: The Missing Link, Samuel G. Cochran

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Many of our K-12 schools have experienced various challenges in order to narrow the achievement gap that addresses academic improvement for all students. Arts integration offers a foundation for learning that can improve student achievement. Teaching academic content through the arts provides students with opportunities to engage in 21st Century skills that promote critical thinking, collaboration, creativeness and communication. This project examines how arts integration can improve student learning outcomes and how teacher preparedness and ongoing support contributes to it being an effective framework for educators. The researcher was able to conduct observations and interviews with teachers and write and …

Theatre As Education: Creating And Performing A Play With Elementary School Students, Sarah C. Lopez

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper is an exploration of the concept of theatre as education and what I learned about teaching, transformation, and failure through my thesis project. In order to explore these ideas, I reflect on my experience creating and performing a short play with a group of eight 2^nd and 3^rd grade students over the span of nine weeks. I pinpoint the parts of the process that worked well and discuss how these techniques and activities could be used to enhance curriculum and learning in the classroom. I also discuss which parts of the process failed and what I …

K-12 Students See Steam Everyday, Meghan Reilly Michaud

The STEAM Journal

Today’s students exist in a visual world. A new semiotic language has emerged in the digital age. It consists of an ever-evolving vocabulary of signs and symbols that one can rapidly decipher. Icons represent applications and functions on a plethora of modern devices. Sounds indicate changes and the start and end of activity. The exposure of new audio and visual media are part of everyday communication, now more than ever. The Arts teach our students to better perceive these cues and the information that they deliver.

How To Produce Articulate Artists, Peter J. Barr Phd, Christine Reising

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

This twenty-minute Powerpoint presentation will describe the team-taught, year-long Foundations Core Concepts Program at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. It has been in place since 2006 and has successfully integrated a course previously called "Language of Art" (taught by an art historian) with hands-on studio assignments previously taught in a stand-alone design course (taught by a studio professor). We have found that this hybrid approach is extremely effective in developing sensitive and articulate art majors who are prepared to integrate design concepts into all of their artworks and to analyze and describe eloquently both personal and historical works of …

Performance Art As A Site For Learning: Queer Theory And Performance Studies In The Art Classroom, G. E. Washington

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Today, performance art is one of the most useful mediums for helping individuals see themselves differently. In this of "Out of sight" article, I explore the experience of participating in a student's performance art project. This work was a performance of crossing the road. Here, I discuss the inclusion of overtly queer articulations of personal experience within the art classroom. How can performance art construct learning experiences that engage a dynamic process of self-critique? How are classrooms organized differently when students become actively involved in the development of the art curriculum? And, how might a performative investigation of the sociality …

Toward Art-Making As Liberatory Pedagogy And Practice: Artists And Students In An Anti-Bullying School Reform Initiative, Sharon Verner Chappell

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

I sit at my desk for the last thirty minutes before driving to school where I will teach a painting lesson on abstract art. I am an after school visual arts intervention teacher who travels among ten K-6 urban schools in the Bay Area of California. When I am not on campus, I am working at the district office coordinating visiting artist programs and developing integrated arts curriculum. Yet each day, I notice an increasing disconnect between my duties as a teacher and my own arts practice. My painting, collage, and drawing lessons look just like the ones in the …

Teaching Critical Practice For Future Technologies, Leslie Sharpe

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

What are the issues when faculty wishes to teach art students critical or alternative practices with newer technologies not yet widely available to the public? Can one teach alternative practices that consider social or personal contexts when the technologies are not yet publicly available? What other issues are involved when teaching art students to do fine art with such technologies, and when not training artists to do commercial work for the communications industry or mainstream media? What does it mean for the art students who wants to use these technologies for fine art to have ideas for their use, but …

Revisiting Social Theory In Art Education: Where Have We Been? Where Are We Today? Where Are We Going? Where Could We Go?, Jan Jagodzinski

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The title's spin-off from Gauguin's self-reflective statement: D'où vernons-nouse? Que sommes-raus? Où allons-nous? painted towards the closing of the 19th century when colonialist expansion and Imperialism were at their heights, seems to be an appropriate allusion as this year's 21st Social Caucus journal inaugurates the beginning of a new millennium. The irony of the title should be apparent, as should the fortuitousness of the volume's number. The epic proportions of the questions (and the painting) compressed into the bit size of an editorial seems laughable. Yet the questions are worth deliberating in the context of the essays that have been …