This book champions the arts as essential to the K-12 educative process. Exploring apparently oppositional approaches to the arts and their role in education, it provides both an overview of arts learning in and out of school as well as a set of artful lenses through which to regard non-arts teaching and learning. With strong implications for practice, the work celebrates inquiry and multiple perspectives as it explores a range of reflections on art, artistry, artists, art education, and the methods and results of arts-related educational research. Featuring discussions and illustrations of selected works of art by children and professional artists, the text: offers practical ideas for thinking of the arts as a model for improving teaching and learning in schools; reaches beyond arts educators and advocates to include those who have no experience in the arts; includes a broad vista of settings for arts teaching and learning, including non-arts classrooms, schools that focus on the arts, community art centers, and art museums; and examines lessons from urban community art centers with a history of working successfully with, and providing safe havens for, disenfranchised students.

This book champions the arts as essential to the K-12 educative process. Exploring apparently oppositional approaches to the arts and their role in education, it provides both an overview of arts learning in and out of school as well as a set of artful lenses through which to regard non-arts teaching and learning. With strong implications for practice, the work celebrates inquiry and multiple perspectives as it explores a range of reflections on art, artistry, artists, art education, and the methods and results of arts-related educational research. Featuring discussions and illustrations of selected works of art by children and professional artists, the text: offers practical ideas for thinking of the arts as a model for improving teaching and learning in schools; reaches beyond arts educators and advocates to include those who have no experience in the arts; includes a broad vista of settings for arts teaching and learning, including non-arts classrooms, schools that focus on the arts, community art centers, and art museums; and examines lessons from urban community art centers with a history of working successfully with, and providing safe havens for, disenfranchised students.

The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more modern art and aesthetics. Contributors combine close formal analysis with more theoretical approaches: chapters examine framing devices across multiple media (including vase and fresco painting, relief and free-standing sculpture, mosaics, manuscripts and inscriptions), structuring analysis around the themes of 'framing pictorial space', 'framing bodies', 'framing the sacred' and 'framing texts'. The result is a new cultural history of framing - one that probes the sophisticated and playful ways in which frames could support, delimit, shape and even interrogate the images contained within.

Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a deep insight and comprehension of the world of Art. Contents: What is Art? The Structure of Art Significance of Materials Used in Art Describing Art - Formal Analysis, Types, and Styles of Art Meaning in Art - Socio-Cultural Contexts, Symbolism, and Iconography Connecting Art to Our Lives Form in Architecture Art and Identity Art and Power Art and Ritual Life - Symbolism of Space and Ritual Objects, Mortality, and Immortality Art and Ethics

The book is a comprehensive phenomenological study of meanings that are unique to the major visual art forms.

EDUCATION / Arts in Education

With the insights she has gleaned from her close and subtle observation of parent-teacher conferences, renowned Harvard University professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has written a wise, useful book about the ways in which parents and teachers can make the most of their essential conversation—the dialogue between the most vital people in a child’s life. “The essential conversation” is the crucial exchange that occurs between parents and teachers—a dialogue that takes place more than one hundred million times a year across our country and is both mirror of and metaphor for the larger cultural forces that define family-school relationships and shape the development of our children. Participating in this twice-yearly ritual, so friendly and benign in its apparent goals, parents and teachers are often wracked with anxiety. In a meeting marked by decorum and politeness, they frequently exhibit wariness and assume defensive postures. Even though the conversation appears to be focused on the student, adults may find themselves playing out their own childhood histories, insecurities, and fears. Through vivid portraits and parables, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot captures the dynamics of this complex, intense relationship from the perspective of both parents and teachers. She also identifies new principles and practices for improving family-school relationships. In a voice that combines the passion of a mother, the skepticism of a social scientist, and the keen understanding of one of our nation’s most admired educators, Lawrence-Lightfoot offers penetrating analysis and an urgent call to arms for all those who want to act in the best interests of their children. For parents and teachers who seek productive dialogues and collaborative alliances in support of the learning and growth of their children, this book will offer valuable insights, incisive lessons, and deft guidance on how to communicate more effectively. In The Essential Conversation, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot brings scholarship, warmth, and wisdom to an immensely important cultural subject—the way we raise our children.