Framing Education as Art

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, arts-related strategies for improving teaching and learning in schools.
• Reaches beyond arts educators and advocates to include those who have no experience in the arts.
• Addresses 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.
• Includes lessons learned from urban community art centers with a history of working successfully with, and providing safe havens for, disenfranchised students.

Jessica Hoffmann Davis is a cognitive developmental psychologist and founder of the Arts in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“In this pathbreaking and graceful book, Davis resists the dualisms that distort and the ideology that politicizes conversations in the field. Instead, she challenges us to consider a paradigmatic shift—a bold reframing of our view—that urges educators and policymakers to look to the arts for inspiration, innovation, provocation, and direction.”
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Professor, Harvard University and author of The Essential Conversation and Respect

“Jessica Davis takes her readers on an adventurous journey through the arts and art education in their interconnectedness: in museums, community centers, schools, and in partnerships with professional artists. She ends with a suggestive epiphany having to do with a ‘wheel of culture’ with the arts at the center.”
Maxine Greene, Professor Emerita, Teachers College, Columbia University

“ Framing Education as Art not only lets us see education as art, but art as education as well. It’s a beautifully crafted work.”
— Elliot W. Eisner, Lee Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of Art, Stanford University