Peddling peace in Pakistan

Chintan Girish Modi

Teacher Plus profiles Islamabad based artist, filmmaker, and educator Fouzia Minallah who aims to inspire in children a love of art that thrives in their surroundings and their traditions, not just in books, art galleries, and the Internet.

Inner-child expressions: using art in the classroom

Sasha Braganza

Why are the arts so important in school you ask? Because they are the best means of helping children open up and express themselves, thereby giving teachers a true understanding of their students. Teachers can then make use of this knowledge in the way they teach their students.

From the senses to the world

Aditya Pandya

Education is given to children so that they can lead good, complete lives tomorrow. The purpose of art education is no different. Art must be taught in schools to help nurture a child’s natural senses so that they understand the world better and therefore live their lives better.

Art education and the usefulness question

Prakash Iyer

Why should art be taught in schools? Obviously not every student becomes an artist. There is a limit to using arts to teach other subjects. And as for the attitudes and ways of thinking that art develops, there are other ways too to enhance human values. So why teach art? Art helps all of us, even the non-artists, appreciate beauty and express emotions when we find words limiting. And that is an important thing to learn in today’s world.

Rendering relevance through the arts

Lakshmi Karunakaran

Government school teachers in Karnataka are being given a fillip in their teaching careers. India Foundation for the Arts, an organization set up for the promotion of education in the arts in India, is training these teachers in good teaching practices using the arts, thereby opening up more and more teachers to the idea of using art to teach.

Beyond justification: what students learn from the arts

Jessica Hoffmann Davis

The arts have always had to fight for their space in the curriculum. To justify the presence of the arts we talk about the value they add in our learning of the “more important” subjects. While it is true that we can learn math from the beats of the drum, language through song and science from works of art, perhaps arts should be taught not for what they do in service of other subjects but for the intrinsic value they bring to us as human beings.