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Designed by the Harvard University Project Zero team, Artful Thinking is basically a program that aims to improve students' awareness of art and increase their critical thinking skills by interpreting works of art and discussing them. In this way, students will acquire twenty-first century skills such as critical thinking and aesthetic understanding. The primary objective of this research was to investigate the impact of the Artful Thinking program on the development of critical thinking skills and attitudes towards art in 6th grade students, by implementing it as action research. This study was conducted in a middle school in Gaziantep, Turkey. 23 students and a Turkish teacher participated in the study. A total of twenty-four works of art (paintings, graffiti and ancient mosaics) were shown to students over eight weeks. Students expressed their opinions about each picture for 10-15 minutes. In order to make the students think in higher-order about art, the teacher asked questions prepared by the researcher. Thus, students were enabled to develop critical and higher order thoughts about the paintings. The findings from the students, teacher, and researcher indicated that the Artful Thinking program had a favorable impact on the students' perceptions of art, and that the students' cognitive abilities and capacity for articulation were enhanced by this program.

The art review is a genre that describes the artwork under discussion, educates its readers, as well as interprets and evaluates the work. It is a genre that plays a crucial role in the art community as it publicizes art, promotes artists, educates the public and enhances their appreciation of art. This study investigates this underexplored genre through the move analysis of a 67,807-word corpus of 70 art review texts collected from online art magazines and online newspapers containing an art review section. The study reveals seven moves and seven steps found in the art reviews in the corpus: heading (Move 1), describing the work (Move 2), providing external information (Move 3), providing the artist's background (Step 3.1), providing general knowledge (Step 3.2), discussing a past event that influences the work (Step 3.3), mentioning quotes (Step 3.4), mentioning other reviews (Step 3.5), interpreting the work (Move 4), judging the work (Move 5), providing evaluative comments (Step 5.1), recommending or disrecommending the work (Step 5.2), expressing general opinions and thoughts (Move 6), and sharing the writer's personal experience (Move 7). The results also show no common move patterns, indicating that the genre allows fluidity and creativity in structuring the content.

The research focuses on examining the use of the interpretation of works of art in pre-school education in three dimensions - the current state of the use of the interpretation of works of art, the opinions of kindergarten teachers on art, and the opportunities for kindergarten teachers to acquire knowledge about the theory and history of art in their undergraduate training or in other forms of education. The aim of the research was to determine a correlation between the aforementioned variables. 366 kindergarten teachers responded to the items of the self-constructed questionnaire. It has been proven that the current state of the use of the interpretation of works of art in pre-school education can be described as below average, the opportunities for kindergarten teachers to acquire knowledge from the theory and history of art in their pre-graduate training or in other forms of education were lower than average, and the opinions of kindergarten teachers on art can also be described as below average. There is a statistically significant positive correlation between the aforementioned dimensions of the interpretation of works of art in pre-school education.

In this research, it is aimed to examine the perceptions of artwork of middle school 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students within the scope of Art Criticism and Aesthetics learning field acquisitions in the Visual Arts Curriculum. This research is a qualitative research and was designed in the general survey model, which is one of the descriptive research types. Middle school students in the study group of the research were selected according to the easily accessible sample type from the purposeful sampling strategy. Accordingly, the study group of the research consists of 100 students studying in the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades of a middle school in the 2020-2021 academic year. The data were collected through a form consisting of 11 questions prepared to determine the students' perceptions of artwork. Descriptive analysis method was used to analyse the data of the research. The data obtained were analysed in two stages; determining the frequency and percentage values according to the number of students choosing the pictures which are artwork or non-artwork, the density of the sentences in which the students stated the reasons for choosing the pictures, and the determination of categories and themes according to the answers given in accordance with the purpose of the research. Among the results of the research, it is seen that especially colour, perspective, composition and realism are effective in the selection of some works. While the sentences stating the reasons for the preference of the students who chose the work of art mostly developed in line with the field of art criticism and aesthetic learning, it was observed that the answers of some students were not conscious.

Utilizing critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012), this exploratory study examined the lived experiences of 19 Black art students as they navigated critique spaces at institutions of art and design. Critique (or "crit") is the primary evaluative tool used in art schools with the purpose of providing constructive, generative feedback to students (Costantino, 2015). Findings from this thematic analysis revealed how the subjective nature of critique often allowed for racially biased responses by faculty and peers. Participants noted four prevalent interactions during critique: Cultural incompetence, silence, superficial praise, and a focus on form. Interviewees also described the psychological impact of critique and the coping skills they employed. This study offers implications for administrators, faculty, and staff as they address institutional inequities in assessment practices at colleges of art and design and within other performance-based majors and institutions.

Perception is one of the most fundamental aspects of human communication. This activity utilizes art to help students experience and understand the psychological and communicative aspects of perception. Students are required to observe and discuss their observations about selected pieces of artwork. After completing the activity, students enhance their abilities to form connections between their experiences and course concepts about perception. Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Small Group Communication, Public Speaking, Introduction to Communication, Nonverbal Communication, Listening, and Visual Communication. Objectives: The activity aims to provide students with first-hand experience and appreciation for how perception influences the way humans receive and interpret all types of messages.

Turkey's Ministry of National Education aims to identify and develop valuable characteristics to prepare the nation's young for their professional life as adults. The Ministry has been conducting an extensive and comprehensive review of the educational system since the beginning of 2000. Educational system was implemented in time for the 2012/2013 academic year. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the clarity; the developmental, ethical, and intellectual appropriateness of Turkey's 2013 Arts Education policy to improve the Visual Arts curriculum. The evaluation shows that the curriculum contains significant erroneous information, creating misunderstandings regarding explanations of art and design in Visual Arts. The results of this study can be used as a reference for future academic and ministerial research.

Art is one of the most powerful ways of expressing an individual's internal state, expectations and needs with an aesthetic attitude. Different materials can be used during the expression process including colour, line, sound, movement, word, object and so on. Although the materials used in these branches of art are different from each other, the path followed in the application process and the final results are the same "to reveal an aesthetic product". In order for an artistic practice to mature and reach the beautiful one, the practitioner must have the art education discipline and acquire certain knowledge, skills and understanding of the art field concerned. The art of painting, which is one of the plastic arts, provides the ability to search for beauty through lines and colours on two dimensional surfaces, to create compositions and express the individual's self with this composition, also has its own beauty value criteria. From this point of view, it was aimed to determine the opinions of the prospective teachers studying in the Department of Painting Education in the study about the beauty criteria that should be in the picture. In this study, survey method which is one of the quantitative research methods was preferred. As a data collection tool, a five-point Likert-type scale was developed by the researchers, and 25 items were used. 110 prospective teachers from various grades participated in the study. The results of the research showed that the prospective teachers greatly contributed to the beauty criteria that should be in the picture.

Writing about art is a complex task that differs considerably from other forms of writing because it requires detailed understanding and application of certain theoretical frameworks for visual analysis. This has proven to be a major challenge amongst university and college students in Nigeria who grapple with interpreting visuals into text. The objective of this research is to identify the factors that impede students' writing abilities in art departments through literature review, then develop a conceptual guide to art appreciation and criticism for undergraduates and budding art critics. The research demonstrates that emphasis on the aesthetic philosophy of art and the predominant creative pedagogy used for art tutelage in Nigeria is responsible for the poor approach to art writing amongst students. To address this problem, a combination of three theoretical frameworks: "Ekphrasis," "Formal Analysis" and "Iconographic Analysis" are used to develop a new five-step-system for art appreciation. Results show that the juxtaposition of analytical elements from "Ekphrasis," "Formal" and "Iconographic Analysis" leads to the development of a simple but effective theoretical framework for writing about art which covers five key areas of description, analysis, context, meaning and judgement. Having tested this new framework with tremendous success, this research concludes that the application of this five-step-system will improve writing about art in tertiary institutions by acquainting students with the theoretical tools/lexicons to effectively analyse their own works and those of established artists.

Professional and amateur artists seek inspiration from viewing the works of others to enhance their creativity. This paper focuses on inspiration for artistic creation through art viewing by reviewing psychology studies on what types of artwork promote individuals' inspiration for creation (inspiring artwork) and how they experience inspiration through their art appreciation (the appreciation process). In particular, we claim that a "dual" focus--that is a focus on both evaluating the artworks of others and reflecting on one's own art making--is a core mechanism for inspiration. Further, we present a theoretical framework to explain the types of creative outcomes expected in line with such a dual focus.

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate how teaching the discourse of critique, an integral part of the video production process, can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills helping more young people become producers rather than consumers of digital media. Design/methodology/approach: This paper describes an instrumental qualitative case study (Stake, 2000) in two elective high school video production classrooms in the Midwestern region of the USA. The author conducted observations, video and audio recorded critique sessions, conducted semi-structured interviews and collected artifacts throughout production including storyboards, brainstorms and rough and final cuts of videos. Findings: Throughout critique, young video producers used argumentation strategies to cocreate meaning, multiple methods of inquiry and questioning, critically evaluated feedback and synthesized their ideas and those of their peers to achieve their intended artistic vision. Young video producers used feedback in the following ways: incorporated feedback directly into their work, rejected and ignored feedback, or incorporated some element of the feedback in a way not originally intended. Originality/value: This paper demonstrates how teaching the discourse of critique can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills. Educators can teach argumentation and inquiry strategies through using thinking guides that encourage active processing and through engaging near peer mentors. Classroom educators can integrate the arts-based practice of the pitch critique session to maximize the impact of peer-to-peer learning.

Art educators are adept at using images to communicate and spark dialogues. But what happens when the conversations that are needed in classrooms concern topics that are intentionally silenced or repeated so often that contradictions become invisible? The dilemma of visibility is central when talking to students about Whiteness, which White people are trained not to see. How can educators use images to cut through centuries of systemic erasures to help students see and critique White supremacy? The author took up this dilemma in the visual arts section of an art integration course for a diverse group of preservice teachers. Using dual assignments involving art criticism and creation, the author prompted students to recognize Whiteness and power through images, and to respond by producing their own counterstories.

This study adopted 30 first year graphic design students' artwork, with critical analysis using Feldman's model of art criticism. Data were analyzed quantitatively; descriptive statistical techniques were employed. The scores were viewed in the form of mean score and frequencies to determine students' performances in their critical ability. Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to find out the correlation between students' studio practice and art critical ability scores. The findings showed most students performed slightly better than average in the critical analyses and performed best in selecting analysis among the four dimensions assessed. In the context of the students' studio practice and critical ability, findings showed there are some connections between the students' art critical ability and studio practice.

The article analyzes the role of humanities in forming the worldview of modern person in the system of higher education. It emphasizes the idea that a graduate of the higher education institute, and especially the university, should not only be an expert (a professional), but above all, a person of culture. Humanities as the basis of university education are considered in the article in a historical context and in the context of creation of educational institution in conditions of humanistic worldview formation. The authors refer to the historical experience of European and Russian universities, show the major periods of formation of the capital and the provincial Arts in the university educational space. The article emphasizes close relationship of the organization of the university humanities departments in the process of archaeological research and the development of museums and gallery movement. The article characterizes the contribution of Russian scientists in the formation of art disciplines teaching in educational institutions of Russia--A. G. Gabrichevsky, A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, E.N. Atsarkina, V. N. Lazarev, A. N. Savinova, N. V. Alpatov, Y. M. Lotman and others. The authors consider the concepts of "contextual thinking", "one-dimensional person" and "multi-dimensional person". The article presents domestic experience of art criticism development as a science in the system of higher education.

In this article Daniel Brodén explores the ambivalence in teaching about art and aesthetics in the humanities. By comparing and contrasting Gert J. J. Biesta's educational theory and Jacques Rancière's writing on aesthetics, he hopes to bring some of the particularities of aesthetic experiences into focus and to discuss a tension in educational situations that concern students' interpretation of aesthetic texts: how the teacher, on the one hand, will serve as a representative for a formal system of education -- or what Rancière calls a system of inequality -- and, on the other hand, should respect the autonomy of the aesthetic experience. Brodén argues, however, that more interesting than the ambivalence itself is the question of how we can acknowledge this tension in productive ways. Thus, his aim here is to show how the teacher can contribute to the verification of an interpretive approach to art, with Rancière's axiom of equality in mind. Drawing on Biesta's writings, Brodén also highlights how the teacher can provide students with possibilities to pursue a subject-ness and how the risks involved call for a deconstructive approach to the enactment of teacher power. The article concludes by suggesting that we would do better not to view the ambivalence in focus as a problem, but instead to see it as something that calls for continuous engagement and critical reflection.

In this article, I explore some of Marina Abramovic's artworks as a reference point for developing a possible philosophical orientation that privileges lingering in the search of research. Abramovic's work eludes conventional interpretation. As such, it provides a potential lens with which to rethink and reorient research practices toward unpredictable and unprecedented ways of knowing occurring beyond the scope of established qualitative methodological research processes. In this article, I attempt to reconceptualize the process of research not by offering yet another process, but by articulating a disposition that allows for the emergence of new concepts of thought that might disrupt interpretation, postpone conclusions, and give rise to novel modes of research.

"Artwork scholarship" is defined in this context as a forum for inquiry that involves artful expressions, innovative experimentation and critical propositions informed by aesthetic characteristics as well as customary approaches for the advancement of the arts and education. 'Latitudes' in turn take into account the adaptations of artful expressions for educational purposes and the contributions of ongoing critique of art as scholarship. If we deliberate on the pedagogic turn to art as research in tandem with a disposition of latitudes, embracing the tensions of ongoing contestations implicated in such evolving conceptual geographies, arts-based educational research (ABER) becomes a means to negotiate activities that articulate "when" is artwork scholarship, rather than what is art as research. In this way, latitudes as a proposition -- metaphorically, pedagogically and spatially -- is a potential mode for the mapping of theoretical, methodological and practical scholarly encounters, embracing the very tension that the arts evoke, and in the course of so doing, makes such work emergent and inclusive of creative possibilities.

The philosophical foundation for teaching art criticism in schools has been dominated by formalist and expressionist aesthetics, while from a practical point of view it has been influenced by art criticism models that emphasise observation and linguistic practices. Instead of asking students to observe an artwork and make verbal or written statements, George Geahigan proposed an inquiry-based art criticism learning model that engages students in personal response, research, and aesthetic concept and perceptual skill acquisition activities. Using inquiry-based art criticism as a foundation for curriculum development and connecting the model to authentic situations in schools, the present study investigated the effectiveness of the model on student learning. Fifteen secondary school teachers were invited to participate. Eight teachers taught the experimental group (n=85) with inquiry-based curriculum plans and the other seven teachers taught the control group (n=82) with their own school curriculum plans. Students of both groups were asked to write an art criticism essay before and after the implementation of the curriculum plans. The results demonstrated that the overall improvement of the experimental group after one academic year was significantly greater than that of the control group. This article reports on the theoretical framework, methodology and results of the study. It was found that the inquiry-based approach was a successful strategy in improving students' skills in analysing, judging and using aesthetic and contextual knowledge in art criticism writing. The discussion focuses on the improvements that were made in the art criticism essays of the experimental group.

This article draws on Searle's philosophical realism to explore how critical agency is grounded in critical reasoning and supports the construction of art criticism as an institutional practice in art and design education. Examples of critical exchanges between a teacher and her students reveal how intentional beliefs inherent in the teacher's pedagogical choices implicate students in taking critical agency when constructing a collaborative interpretation of the meaning of a contemporary artwork. The article concludes with some reflections on the implications of a realist account of critical agency for teacher pedagogy and student learning.

Art criticism was introduced into art education to help students understand works of art. However, art interpretation methods differ according to the educational goals specified for various types of art students. The fine arts interpretation procedures established in education are usually purely theoretical and exclusively verbal, and are thus appropriate mostly for art theory students, whose educational goal is art theory competence. On the other hand, these methods are inadequate for fine arts students, whose educational goal is artistic competence. Namely, artistic competence cannot be achieved solely by means of theory and discussion, but must include practical, "hands-on" artistic experience. Proceeding from this recognition, this paper proposes a fine arts interpretation method that integrates an art theory approach with an artistic one and can thus help fine arts students attain their educational goal (i.e., artistic competence).

This paper begins with a brief discussion of aesthetic theory, especially as it relates to art education. Then, to see how theory may apply to practice, it describes an investigation into the manner in which encounters with artworks unfold, how meanings are constructed and values articulated, based on the study of four volunteers' interactions with two artworks that lend themselves to variable responses, especially in regard to social and cultural issues. The study relies on participant mapping of the individual moments of their encounters and their subsequent reflections on the experience. (Contains 3 endnotes, 2 tables, and 3 figures.)

Visual culture studies have become the focus of research in recent years mainly due to the frequent use of art applications in Visual Arts courses in primary schools and the inadequate content of discipline based art education for the interpretation of today's multiple stimulants. By interrogating students' semantic stratums related to visuals, visual culture studies carried out in Visual Arts courses can help students gain a different perspective regarding artistic studies. The present study aimed finding out how visual culture studies can be carried out in Visual Arts courses in primary schools. The study had an action research design and was conducted during the 10 hours class-time of a Visual Arts course in a third-grade class of a primary school in Eskisehir in the fall semester of 2007-2008 academic year. The data of the present study, which was conducted on seven focal students, were collected with various data collection tools, such as demographic information scale, video recordings, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, researcher diaries and student diaries. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive analysis. The present study revealed that the students effectively participated in visual culture studies; that they made critical interrogations by broadening their thoughts based on their previous knowledge; and that they found the course more entertaining thanks to the visual culture studies. In conclusion, findings of the study suggest that visual art applications, which will encourage students to criticize cultural meanings within the Visual Art Curriculum, may be used as a strong instrument to help students interpret the visual world and become more efficient in expressing their ideas in art works.

Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE), a theory developed in the USA, has been influential but also used in Art Education institutions world-wide. One of its stated goals was to develop the quality of teaching art education. Today, it is used as a theory for identifying and assessing good practices in the field of Art Education. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the Art Studio courses at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in light of the DBAE theory. The main research question was formulated as: To what extent do the Art Studio courses at SQU provide experiences in the disciplines of Art History, Art Criticism, Aesthetics, and Art Production? The structured-observation schedule and students' evaluation sheet were used in this research. The results show that the lecturers at SQU do not focus highly on the Art Content, which is derived from the four disciplines. On the contrary, the main focus was on the discipline of Art Production, suggesting an Art-Studio orientation. However, the standard in this discipline, Art Production, was not rated very highly by the students or the researcher. The results also suggest that the Art Education Department at SQU should adopt a clear philosophy of teaching and learning in and through Art and that the Art content for the Art-based courses should be derived from the four disciplines as well as from related-fields such as Multiculturalism, New Technology and Educational Museum. These disciplines should be integrated across the program as far as possible while Art studio should remain at the heart of the undergraduate program. This theory should be generalised to all Art-courses to ensure at least the minimum, necessary experience in each of the four disciplines for each Art-based course at SQU.

This study draws on student engagement factors to examine the relationship between students' non-school-based arts experiences on their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy to participate in visual arts responding tasks. Visual arts responding in the curriculum includes learning about artists and artworks, decoding art and making critical judgements, and is important in building twenty-first century learning skills such as critical thinking and communication. A total of 266 Year 10 to 12 students from 18 schools in Western Australia (WA) participated in the quantitative research, which explored outside-school arts engagement as well as cognitive and psychological engagement factors in their current year of secondary schooling. The findings showed that while being an art consumer appears to impact on intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, producing art as a hobby outside of school does not appear to do so. The research raised questions about links between practice and theory, and how to promote students' engagement in responding.

This article reports on the development and validation of a rubric for assessing students' written responses to artworks. Since the implementation of the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary Curriculum in 2009, art educators have seen responding to artworks as increasingly important. In this context, the Art Criticism Assessment Rubric (ACAR) was developed. On the basis of Feldman's and Geahigan's theories of art criticism, eight evaluation criteria were identified. The inter-rater reliability (IRR) of the ACAR was examined. A preliminary IRR test was conducted and an excellent intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) value of 0.91 was obtained. For the main study, six independent raters, who were divided into three groups of two, were trained and invited to rate 87 art criticism essays written by students from eight secondary schools. Most dimensions of the ACAR achieved good ICC values. The results show that the ACAR is an acceptable rubric for providing a reliable assessment of students' written responses to artworks. However, two dimensions, Originality and Balanced Views and Application of Aesthetic and Contextual Knowledge, obtained poor ICC values. This may be owing to the lack of consensus on the definition of originality and the raters' unfamiliarity with the concept of aesthetic knowledge. The researchers suggest that dimension-specific samples rated from high to low scores should be provided in raters' training.

Recent educational initiatives have emphasised the importance of fostering critical thinking skills in today's students in order to provide strategies for becoming successful problem solvers throughout life. Other scholars advocate the use of critical thinking skills on the grounds that such tools can be used effectively when considering social justice issues. In this article we make the case that the teaching and learning strategies of analytic art criticism can serve as fundamental tools used not just for the study of art but can also centre critical thinking and analysis in all aspects of the art education curriculum. Our argument begins with a review of literature on the use of art criticism for critical thinking and meaning making. Then we describe our efforts to address critical thinking with our students by using the critical analysis model of art criticism and applying it to learning environments for forming reasoned judgments about teaching and learning, and also as springboard for examining social justice issues. We believe that promoting this form of affectively driven, intellectually guided critical thinking makes our students potentially more successful not just in their encounters with art and education, but also in their lives as human beings beyond school.

This article describes the learning experiences of three pre-service teachers within a university-level course entitled "Aesthetics and Art Criticism for the Classroom." Discussion is focused on the nature of the meaning-making that emerges from aesthetic encounters and its educational value. Specifically, what can pre-service generalist teachers learn from aesthetic encounters that they may ultimately apply in their own classrooms? For evidence of emergent meaning-making I rely on examination of what I call "aesthetigrams". These are essentially maps of one's encounter with an artwork. They provide a basis for reflection on the encounter, for the student and for myself as the instructor, as well as insights into the nature of aesthetic learning. (Contains 6 figures and 5 footnotes.)

In this monograph the author offers the reader a new perspective on an important, dynamic, and sometimes daunting issue: managing successful school-based leadership. Organized around the seven elements of art criticism, the author uses an arts-based approach to weave together notions of research-based leadership skills for successful school-based management with standards of professional competence as represented by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards for School Leaders.

In this edition of Learning Connections, the authors show how technology can enhance study of weather patterns, reading comprehension, real-world training, critical thinking, health education, and art criticism. The following sections are included: (1) Social Studies; (2) Language Arts; (3) Computer Science and ICT; (4) Art; and (5) Health. (Contains 3 resources.)

The purpose of this study was to provide a description and analysis of repertoire performed at middle school band contests in northern Illinois. Repertoire from 10 Illinois Grade School Music Association--Northern Division district level contests were analyzed in relation to the frequency pieces were performed, dates of publication, publishers represented, and the inclusion of titles on recommended music lists. All contests were held in 2003 and included a mix of urban, suburban, and rural schools. Among the contest programs analyzed, 81 concert bands from 72 schools performed a total of 243 compositions. Results indicated 1) 46.1% of the selections were composed by just 9.9% of the total number of composers/arrangers represented, 2) nearly 9.9% of the pieces were composed or arranged by just one person, 3) 29.2% of the literature was less than three years old, and 4) 27.6% of the music was published by a single company. Furthermore, 5) transcriptions and arrangements of historical masterworks accounted for 7.8% of the repertoire, 6) 1.6% of pieces represented music of a non-European culture, and 7) 48.1% of concert selections were included in at least one of the music lists examined. Implications of these findings in relation to national and state learning standards and recommendations for broadening the repertoire programmed for middle school band contests are discussed. (Contains 6 tables.)

This article highlights the current dialogue about educational technology and ways of knowing in visual art education. The authors outline and evaluate the development and testing phases of a hypertextual online visual art course offered at the then Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (http://www.eciad.ca/www/) in the summer of 2001. Through this, we offer a framework for the evaluation of online visual art critical studies courses.

An investigation of art criticism was undertaken with studio artists, art therapists, college nonart majors, and clients receiving art therapy services. The method involved establishing aesthetic and expressive criteria taken from Kramer's (1971) concept of formed expression. Utilizing her concepts of "evocative feeling," "inner consistency," and "economy of means," the author systematized responses to art during critiques regardless of the artist's level of functioning, presenting problems, or studio setting. An emphasis is placed upon empathically yet constructively providing feedback to the artist in ways that are both artistically and personally meaningful.

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students' abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public examination context is a critical issue in Hong Kong because the new senior secondary curriculum and assessment has brought attention to the role of written language in the art examination paper. This means the examination assesses not only students' abilities to interpret art, but also their language abilities required to respond to art in written form. Since this new mode of assessment of art criticism has been published a number of issues have appeared. Recent studies show that teachers and students perceive this development negatively and they believe that the written format will assess students' written language abilities rather than their critical abilities. These findings challenge the justification of the new art assessment policy and raise questions about the role of written language in responding to art. This article aims to raise the issue of the marriage between language and art criticism in the Hong Kong public examination context. It argues and examines the relationship of language to art interpretation, reasoning in the assessment, and issues in the public art criticism examination context. The issues addressed in this article provide opportunities for researchers and policy makers to reconsider and refine the new form of examination.

How can museum educators create dialogical experiences with European decorative arts? This question frames my essay and stems from the challenges I have faced introducing objects whose original functions seem to overshadow their aesthetic and interpretive value. Repeated efforts to spark rich dialogue and collective interpretation around pieces of decorative art at The Frick Collection, specifically, has shown that, whereas painting and sculpture inspire responses that are not just formal in nature but also subjective and even phenomenological, clocks, commodes, porcelain and other such objects are seemingly less accessible, met with apparent discomfort, and confronted with the following questions: What was this used for? How was it made? How much did it cost? What is its provenance? Painting and sculpture, especially canonical examples of each, seem immune to this line of questioning and thus riper for dialogical engagement as defined by museum educators Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee. Without devaluing the importance of technical art history, functionality, materiality, and the history of collecting, I will explore how museum education--and the visitor experience broadly defined--is affected by the canon of art history's hierarchical categorization of the fine and decorative arts.

This essay explores two canonical installations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Cloisters and African galleries in the Rockefeller wing. After providing a brief history of the formation of these collections and their display strategies, I analyze the effect of exhibition design for a visitor's judgments and impressions of the works of art. I argue that museum educators should incorporate display strategies into the narratives we create in these spaces, and I share approaches that I use in my lectures and tours.