Sharon Verner Chappell

No Child Left With Crayons: The Imperative of Arts-Based Education and Research With Language “Minority” and Other Minoritized Communities

Since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, public discourse on “failing schools” as measured by high-stakes standardized tests has disproportionately affected students from minoritized communities (such as language, race, class, dis/ability), emphasizing climates of assessment at the expense of broader, more democratic, and creative visions of education (e.g., Jordan, 2010; Krashen, 2008). As advocates of the arts in education and multicultural–multilingual learning for all, we join a chorus of concern about the ways in which the “crayons” (synecdoche for all the “arts”) have started to disappear from public school learning and/ or are solely included as handmaidens to improved academic achievement. Likewise, we are concerned about the ways diversity education has been strictly targeted at those “Other” students who “lack” the cultural capital expected for academic success in schools (O. Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010; Garda, 2011; Howard, 2006; Nurenberg, 2011). In this review, we examine the literature on arts education with minoritized youth within landscapes of structural inequity, scientific rationalization, and a resurgence of the racialization of non-White communities and curricula in schools. We identify strong practices in arts education that aim to achieve social justice with both minoritized and majoritized populations. By minoritized youth, we refer to any and all who identify in contextually situated, nondominant communities such as race, class, sexual orientation, language, dis/ability, religion, and gender. As we identify such contexts, we are aware that minority/majority status is unstable and contingent. Despite variations and flexibility, we use this term to identify youth who turn to the arts to navigate their status as “outside” the norm in a variety of ways.

School as Ceremony and Ritual: How Photography Illuminates Performances of Ideological Transfer

Images of the places and activities called “school” as a formal institution are rich data for the inquiring gaze. This article focuses specifically on historical photos of school rituals and ceremonies through which young people perform particular narratives of schooling through repetitive embodied practice and in turn construct values and beliefs about themselves and wider society. In particular, we look at rituals of the habitual, coming of age ceremonies, patriotic rituals and ceremonies, and degradation rituals and ceremonies. In analysis of these photographs, we ask, what meanings are (re)performed in such rituals and ceremonies? Why are these performances important to consider in the context of young people’s identity negotiation and school reform? And, after such an analysis, how might any of the performances contain spaces for (student and teacher) agency, including resistance and transformation?

Building Social Inclusion through Critical Arts-Based Pedagogies in University Classroom Communities.

In humanities and education university classrooms, the authors facilitated counter-narrative arts-based inquiry projects in order to build critical thought and social inclusion. The first author examines public performance installations created by graduate students in elementary and bilingual education on needs-based and dignity-based rights of bilingual families at schools. The second author examines visual and performance art pieces on historical colonial practices in world history, created by undergraduate theatre students. We suggest that critical arts-based pedagogies can build classroom communities and social inclusion, particularly through collaborative counter-narrative and problem-posing research and performance practices about minoritisation in history and contemporary society.

The arts, educational policy, and emergent bilingual learners: Introductory remarks

This special issue of Arts Education Policy Review focuses on the intersections of arts education, emergent bilingual and multilingual learners, and educational policy. A central assumption of this special issue is that the arts are especially valuable for contributing to English learning in tandem with young people’s home languages and new additional languages. Through an arts-based development of bi/multi-lingualism and bi/multi-literacy, young people creatively experience social ideas, patterns, and relationships as they navigate the policies affecting their lives. This special issue features articles that raise questions about, and offer models for, how multilingual and multicultural practices in arts education can inform educational policy, and how policy might lead a vision for bilingual community development within and through the arts. Our hope is that this issue will be valuable to educators, teaching artists, teacher educators, educational leaders, and educational policy makers who are concerned about the intersections of emergent bilingual and multilingual learners’ and teachers’ lives, as well as the curriculum, pedagogy, and policies that shape their schooling experiences. This issue follows Chappell and Cahnmann-Taylor’s (2013) call to:

A review of The Year We Thought About Love: Behind the Scenes of the Nation’s Longest Running LGBTQ Youth Theater, directed by Ellen Brodsky

“Being a theater director and a youth worker are not that different. We are there to create a play, and we are there to support the youth in dealing with the stuff they are going through every sing...

Writing for Arts Education Policy Review

This article provides readers with suggestions as to how to prepare manuscripts for publication in Arts Education Policy Review. It is presented in a question-and-answer format and includes references to model policy articles.