2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice "What’s going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

Curriculum Issues in Arts Education, Volume 3: The Development of Aesthetic Experience focuses on the processes, methodologies, and approaches involved in the development of aesthetic experience, including art education, developmental theories, and aesthetic assessment. The book first tackles the concept of aesthetic development and aesthetic dimension in art education. The text then explores the psychological viewpoint of aesthetic development and aesthetic development in music. Topics include music education, music and function, task of teachers, developmental relationships between processes or roles, and uses and misuses of developmental theories. The publication ponders on the role of teachers and students, aesthetic development in dance, and drama as learning, art, and aesthetic experience. The manuscript then examines emotional development in adolescence, meaning in aesthetic experience, and aesthetic assessment and the reliability factor. The book is a reliable source of information for educators and readers interested in the development of aesthetic experience.

'Few people would be better qualified than the author to write this innovative and eagerly anticipated post-Kleinian book. Deeply versed in the opus of Bion and Meltzer, the author enhances the concept of "catastrophic change". The analyst who "eschews memory and desire" observes the subtle interplay of transference and countertransference (Meltzer's "counter dreaming") as it works through aesthetic conflicts. The ensuing reciprocity of the patients and analysts unconscious is revealed as the aesthetical and ethical basis of psychoanalysis. In that sense the psychoanalytical process parallels that of poetic and artistic inspiration. They are all generated by creative internal objects. Harris Williams' intellectual tour de force demonstrates convincingly the human capacity for symbolic thinking that underlies literary, artistic and psychoanalytic creativity. Her encyclopaedic understanding of literature, art and psychoanalysis contributes to this book's virtuosity.'- Irene Freeden, Senior Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists

Paper reprint of a 1987 work.

The Aesthetic Impulse discusses art as a commitment to the development of intelligent feeling. This book discusses the central value of the arts in education as aesthetic, as the qualification of sensibility. This text describes the academics and the instrumentalists as challengers for what arts education is, and allow integration into mainstream education. The arts are different and such difference is their strength. This book also defines sensibility, aesthetics, and the exploration of the vernacular principle or popular art. This text explains what is whole and holy, what a good cultural education is, and labels the educational system under the present conditions as the enemy. The book proposes an Aesthetic Education Department or faculty assigned for coordinating an aesthetic curriculum. This text assesses aesthetic development in children in terms of pragmatic attention, disinterested attention, and tacit attention. This book also explains the development of art, drama, and music into the teen-age years, and also points out that aesthetic education involves development of sensual knowledge. This book is suitable for arts teachers, child educators, school counselors, and school administrators, as well as students in the arts.

The Aesthetic Imperative: Relevance and Responsibility in Arts Education is a collection of papers that covers various concerns in assessment in the context of arts education. In the first chapters, the text examines the predicament of the arts. The next two chapters relate assessment in the context of esthetic education and evaluation in the arts. Chapter 4 talks about the assessment of esthetic developments in the visual mode. The fifth chapter details the importance of evaluating the quality of the test itself, while the sixth chapter covers the conflict between schools and art education. In Chapter 7, the book talks about treating English as an art. The eighth chapter discusses the relevance of art in education, while the ninth chapter provides a conclusive discussion on art education. The text will be of great interest to readers who are concerned with the status of art as part of a school curriculum.