Actively listening and building bridges among students, teachers, and communities provides learners with authentic opportunities to be involved, invested, and ignite meaningful change. This book celebrates students' first-tellings of their experiences as "students with differences" in schools. Throughout the authors' school experiences, they yearned for spaces to share their expertise, thoughts, ideas, talents, and aspirations. These authors emphasize the need to recognize student voice, which they contend, should permeate all levels of collaborative work in schools. These collaborations include, but are not limited to the integration of diverse assessments, differentiation, curriculum design, arts-based projects, inquiry, establishing school policies, and evaluating daily practices in schools. What students have to say matters. However, authors reiterate how often schools attempted to silence them, especially due to the label assigned to them: "disabled." How students learn matters. What students learn matters. Their untapped sense of wonderment plays a pertinent role in their growth and development. Together, these authors utilize artmaking to express how they navigate oppressive systems, such as school. They contend there is a need for K-12 students to co-create knowledge and build bridges among themselves, educators, families, and diverse communities. Their new ways of knowing through this artmaking process afforded them with a renewed relevance for learning and the need to promote authentic school reform. Bottom line: students matter. Their leadership, creativity, and capacity to think system-wide are essential to classroom, school, curriculum, and community needs. These young authors stress the need to continue this significant work and emphasize the power of student voice through artmaking. ENDORSEMENT: "This book reveals the hidden curriculum behind how students negotiate school environments that are often indifferent or even hostile to them. It demonstrates their resilience, their perceptions and how experiences in the arts inspire them to overcome the school environment which has silenced or marginalized them. The stories in these pages will inspire you and reinforce your belief in the human spirit." — Fenwick English, Florida Gulf Coast University

The psychology of aesthetics and the arts is dedicated to the study of our experiences of the visual arts, music, literature, film, performances, architecture and design; our experiences of beauty and ugliness; our preferences and dislikes; and our everyday perceptions of things in our world. The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Aesthetics and the Arts is a foundational volume presenting an overview of the key concepts and theories of the discipline where readers can learn about the questions that are being asked and become acquainted with the perspectives and methodologies used to address them. The psychology of aesthetics and the arts is one of the oldest areas of psychology but it is also one of the fastest growing and most exciting areas. This is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook featuring essays from some of the most respected scholars in the field.

Mission Statement: The mission of this series is to bring issues of diversity and educational risk to the forefront of national attention in order to assist the nation's diverse students at risk of educational failure to achieve academic excellence. This series will focus on critical issues in the education of linguistic and cultural minority students and those placed at risk by factors of race, poverty, and geographic location. Each volume will include empirical studies and syntheses of research that provide an integrated view of the emerging body of research within areas such as: (a) language learning and academic achievement, (b) professional development, (c) family, peers, schools, and communities, (d) instruction in context, and (e) integrated school reform. In order to inform scholars, practitioners, and policy makers, each volume will provide fundamental knowledge about effective programs and practices that affect students place at risk through linguistic, racial, economic, and geographic diversity. Some volumes will be written by one or two authors on a given aspect of educational diversity. Most, however, will be edited, thematic works with chapters written by several expe

This title documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farms anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkows 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming.

This first volume of the Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi represents his work on Art and Creativity. Starting with his seminal 1964 study on creativity up to his 2010 publication in Newsweek, the volume spans over four decades of research and writing and clearly shows Csikszentmihalyi’s own development as an academic, psychologist, researcher and person. Unconventional and unorthodox in his approach, Csikszentmihalyi chose the topic of creativity as a field of study believing it would help him be a better psychologist and advance his understanding of how to live a better life. The chapters in this volume trace the history of the study of creativity back to the days of Guilford and research on IQ and Jacob Getzels’ work on creativity and intelligence. Firmly grounded in that history, yet extending it in new directions, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi started his life-long study on artistic creativity. His first extensive study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago enabled him to observe, test and interview fine art students drawing in a studio. The study formed the very basis of all his work on the subject and has resulted in several articles, represented in this volume, on such creativity-related concepts as problem solving versus problem finding, the personality of the artist, the influence of the social context, creativity as a social construction, developmental issues and flow. The main contribution to the topic of creativity and also the main concept explored in this volume, is the Systems Model of Creativity. Seven chapters in this volume discuss the development of this conceptual model and theory.

The work of queer autistic scholar Nick Walker has played a key role in the evolving discourse on human neurodiversity. Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations, terminology, implications, and leading edges of the emerging neurodiversity paradigm.