Design for learning through the arts
Prabha Sahasrabudhe (Teachers College, Columbia University, USA)
In 1999 the Director-General of UNESCO issued an international appeal for the promotion of arts education and creativity at school. Since then UNESCO has been quite remarkable in its worldwide initiatives on behalf of art education. This article welcomes UNESCO's advocacy effort and invites InSEA and other arts education professional groups to take notice of this activity and enjoin this worldwide dialogue as full and critical partners. This paper suggests a beginning agenda for this dialogue in two parts: a brief commentary on issues that are central to this much needed debate, namely - arts-in-education, interdisciplinarity and school curricula, art and cognition, learning in the arts and transfer of learning to other subjects; and a model that identifies the critical curricular influences that need to be taken into account when arts are introduced into schools as a way of knowing and as a distinctive way of learning.

Integrating Buddhist doctrine into arts education
Ren-Lai Hwang (Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages, Taiwan)
It is vitally important in Taiwan to honour cultural subjectivity and infuse local perspectives into arts education ideology so as to nourish the human spirit in this age of globalization and social change. Cultivation of human kind, a necessary ingredient of healthy spirituality, can be achieved through an interdisciplinary curriculum focusing on core culture interwoven with artistic and humanistic pedagogy. This approach is analogous to the arts activities undertaken by Yuenchao Temple, which are grounded in Buddhist philosophy. This paper explores the Yuenchao Temple model of educating spirituality.

Beyond Lucian Freud: Exploring body representations in children's culture
Judit Vidiella and Fernando Hernández (University of Barcelona, Spain)
In this article we show how theory of Visual Culture Studies can be put into practice in schools. We report on a collaboration between the Department of Art Education in the Fine Art Faculty of the University of Barcelona and an urban primary school. It took the form of Inquiry-based Project Work focussing on alternative ways of understanding and implementing Visual Art Education. Specifically, we investigated a traditional Art History topic (the life and work of the artist Lucian Freud) and explored this from the perspective of Visual Culture Studies. Three aspects of this work are presented and discussed: (a) how art historical representations fix discourse about the body in everyday situations; (b) how Lucian Freud represents people's experience of their bodies and how this affects them; and (c) how pupils experience their bodies given the way the body is represented in media culture and everyday life.

'It's got the same clouds': Young children's concepts of illustrator and artistic style
Virginia Lowe (Monash University, Australia)
This study of the author's two children illuminates the way they learned to recognize illustration' styles from picture books. Before they were five they could name the illustrators of picture books and recognize the same characters in different stories and different characters by the same illustrator. They were able to compare illustrators, recognize different illustrators of the same text, point out where illustrators made 'mistakes' and contrast illustrations with their own drawings.

Writing with photographs writing self: Using artistic methods in the investigation of identity
Anniina Suominen (Kent State University, USA)
In this paper I discuss arts-based, auto-ethnographic research and introduce methods for studying identity construction and visual knowledge/understanding. Included is discussion of self as a subject of study. The paper suggests self-reflexive and artistic methods applicable to all levels of inquiry focusing on construction of cultural identity. In the final section I propose that applying self-reflexive artistic practices to multicultural art education can further develop our understanding of diversity.