This book explores reflective practice as a source and resource for teaching, learning and research in Art and Design, Dance, Drama and Music. Many of the authors are both arts educators and researchers who reflect current trends in arts education, and consider the relationships between teachers, artists and learners across disciplines. The book offers a resource for individual and collective professional development which, by its nature, involves reflecting on practice.

This book fills a gap in the literature of 21st century international visual arts education by providing a structured approach to understanding the benefits of Philosophical Realism in art education, an approach that has received little international attention until now. The framework as presented provides a powerful interface between research and practical reconceptualisations of critical issues and practice in the domains of art, design, and education that involve implications for curriculum in visual arts, teaching and learning, cognitive development, and creativity. The book extends understanding of Philosophical Realism in its practical application to teaching practice in visual arts in the way it relates to the fields of art, design, and education. Researchers, teacher educators and specialist art teachers are informed about how Philosophical Realism provides insights into art, design, and education. These insights vary from clearer knowledge about art to the examination of beliefs and assumptions about the art object. Readers learn how cognitive reflection, and social and practical reasoning in the classroom help cultivate students’ artistic performances, and understand how constraints function in students’ reasoning at different ages/stages of education.

This thesis is based on the assumption that there are significant relationships between my art making process and my art teaching practice. While I am able to implicitly incorporate my feelings and intuition as subjective experiences within my holistic sense of my "self", I am using the systematic and disciplined process of reflective inquiry to make the relationships explicit--that is, to document them, describe them, and make them consciously available for communication and analysis by me and by readers of the thesis. Through self-reflection, I explore how my inner, private meanings are manifested in my outer, public practices as an artist and as a teacher, and see how they can be a resource for other art educators. In presenting my research I adopted David Kolb's model of experiential learning as a frame that I applied to my experiences as an artist and as a teacher. Through description of my art-making practices and reflective introspection, I integrated practical and theoretical orientations within myself as an artist. In the art classroom, I adopted participant observation and action research strategies for my research. The data from the studio was in the form of a journal/diary, along with the actual art products. I have included photographs to show to the reader some of the images I produced. My data from the classroom was in the form of audio tapes, a video tape, log/reflection/diary, and photographs of student's art-work. I then used methods of qualitative research to analyse the data and to discern the relationships that emerged from both collections of data. For me teaching is a life-long process of learning, just as in the creative process there must be a constant evolution. In order for the art-educator to evolve, he/she has to practice creative activity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).

Recommending that art be taught as a humanity, this volume provides a philosophical rationale for the idea of discipline-based art education. Levi and Smith discuss topics ranging over both the public and private aspects of art, the disciplines of artistic creation, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics, and curriculum proposals featuring five phases of aesthetic learning. While there is no consensus on how the various components of aesthetic learning should be presented in order to accomplish the goals of discipline-based art education, the authors point out that progress toward those goals will require that those who design art education programs bring an understanding of the four disciplines to their work. The introductory volume of a five-volume series, this book will appeal to elementary and secondary art teachers, those who prepare teachers at the college level, and museum educators.