This book is a collection of essays that are framed around social issues, art, and teaching. Using an issues-based approach, the authors provide a valuable resource for teaching issues-based content, especially as these issues are explored through contemporary art and visual culture in the classroom.

The focus of the text is on contemporary issues such as those involved in our understandings of identity, the political, the social, the body, difference, and the environment. These important issues are being addressed in the art-world, in critical theory, and in art education. The authors present ideas for educators at all levels who want to incorporate an issues-based approach to teaching. This book combines theoretical perspectives with tangible and practical strategies for generating content and pedagogical approaches. While primarily written for pre-service elementary teachers, Contemporary Issues in Art Education will prove extremely useful to general classroom teachers and art educators at all levels, whether they are teaching in the K-12 or the college classroom.

This anthology is divided into three parts. In the first, Theoretical Frameworks, the chapters provide an overview of a variety of theoretical perspectives that include a focus on postmodern, feminist, multicultural, popular and visual culture, and community issues. The chapters in Content, the second section, center on aspects of creating issues based curricula, issues of identity and difference in the elementary classroom, visual culture and popular media, and artistic issues in the elementary education classroom. In the final part of the book, Pedagogical Strategies, the authors examine issues surrounding the relationship of pedagogy to content, the application of specific pedagogical strategies, and assessment and evaluation in issues based curricula.

The writings that we have included are those that address contemporary issues in both theoretical and practical terms. One of the aims of this anthology is to provide elementary pre-service teachers and art education pre-service teachers with a complex of conceptual frameworks dealing with contemporary issues such as identity, the political, the social, and the environmental and connect these issues to the work being done by contemporary artists and critical theorists. In addition, the chapters encourage connections between contemporary experiences and past experiences, between students' lives and the concepts under discussion, and between a variety of critical contexts.

It is very important to us that readers make connections between the materials that they are reading, the information that they are gathering and their own lives and experiences. In order to facilitate this, each chapter begins with a series of questions and explorations. We encourage readers to take the time to think about these questions, write responses to them, and to use them as a framework within which to read the chapter. We follow each chapter with a similar list of questions that ask readers to re-consider their initial personal reflections in light of the understandings that they have developed from their reading. We also provide a list of additional resources for further investigation of the issues that each chapter presents.

The authors in this book are highly respected within the field of art education. They provide thoughtful approaches to a realm of complex ideas encompassing artistic, social, political, and educational issues. While many of the ideas that are being dealt with are complex, the language used throughout the book is direct and straightforward. Readers will develop an understanding of a variety of ways to teach about such issues in the classroom, how to draw upon the contemporary artworld, and a sense of the critical frameworks within which we need to explore such issues.

Yvonne Gaudelius
Peg Speirs

An anthology based on contemporary art issues being addressed in the art world, in critical theory, in education and in art education, Contemporary Issues in Art Education provides a complex of conceptual frameworks within three sections�theoretical frameworks, content, and pedagogical strategies. The contributors�art educators from the United States and Canada� suggest in both theoretical and practical terms ways to teach art that explore issues such as personal identity, difference, visual culture and the popular media, the environment, aging, and narrative, as well as examining issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. The readings provide an issues-based approach to art education and address schooling as socialization, issues as content and context, the traditions of art education, educational theories, visual art and visual culture. For future and current art educators and others interested in teaching art to children.

(NOTE: Each chapter begins with Questions and Explorations and concludes with Conclusions and Further Questions and Resources and Suggestions for Further Reading.)

I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS: INTRODUCTION.

1. Ideas and Teaching: Making Meaning from Contemporary Art, Graeme Sullivan.
2. Narratives Empowering Teachers and Students: Educational, and Cultural Practice, Joyce Barakett and Elizabeth J. Saccá.
3. In the Trenches, Ed Check.
4. Cultural Content, Identity, and Program Development: Approaches to Art for Education for Elementary Educators, Andra Lucia Nyman.
5. Making the Familiar Strange: A Community-Based Art Education Framework, Flávia Maria Cunha Bastos.
6. There's More to It than Just Looking: The Art Museum as an Integrated Learning Environment, Debra Attenborough.
7. Children Never Were What They Were: Perspectives on Childhood, Paul Duncum.
8. Mapping Identity for Curriculum Work, Kristin Congdon, Marilyn Stewart, and John Howell White.
9. Children Performing the Art of Identity, Charles R. Garoian.
10. Transformation, Invocation, and Magic in Contemporary Art, Education, and Criticism: Reinvesting Art with a Sense of the Sacred, Debra Koppman.

II. CONTENT: INTRODUCTION.

11. Context, Subtext, Schooltext: Building Art-Centered Curricula, Sara Wilson McKay and Susana Monteverde.
12. Tools for Exploring Social Issues and Visual Culture, Carol S. Jeffers.
13. Thematic Curriculum and Social Reconstruction, Eleanor Weisman and Jay Michael Hanes.
14. Teaching Art in the Contexts of Everyday Life, Don H. Krug.
15. If an Artwork Could Speak, What Would It Say? Focusing on Issues for Elementary Art Educators, Shirley Hayes Yokley.
16. Art for Issues' Sake: A Framework for the Selection of Art Content for the Elementary Classroom, Mary Wyrick.
17. Issues of the Body in Contemporary Art, Dan Nadaner.
18. Concerning the Religious in Art Education, Paul S. Briggs.
19. Teaching Art with Historical Places and Civic Memorials, Joanne K. Guilfoil.
20. Computer Animation at an Apache Middle School: Apache Children's Use of Computer Animation Technology, Mary Stokrocki with Marcia Buckpitt.

III. PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES: INTRODUCTION.

21. Exploring Culture and Identity through Artifacts: Three Art Lessons Derived from Contemporary Art Practice, Julia Marshall.
22. Interpreting Art: Building Communal and Individual Understandings, Terry Barrett.
23. The Dynamic Project, Contemporary Issues, and Integrative Learning, Doris M. Guay.
24. Elementary Instruction through Postmodern Art, Melody K. Milbrandt.
25. Open Spaces, Open Minds: Art in Partnership with the Earth, Karen T. Keifer-Boyd.
26. Investigate and Re-Envision Teaching Strategies: Linking Individuals, Communities, and Organizations Through the Visual Arts, Elizabeth B. Reese.
27. Interdisciplinarity and Community as Tools for Art Education and Social Change, Mary Adams.
28. (Re)Shaping Visual Inquiry of Three-Dimensional Art Objects in the Elementary School: A Content-Based Approach, B. Stephen Carpenter, II and Billie Sessions.
29. Three: Reading Lorna Simpson's Art in Contexts, Mary Ann Stankiewicz.
Conclusions and Other Thoughts: Yes, the Witch Can Be Purple.

List of Artists.
List of Contributors.
Index.