The Colors We Feel sheds some light on feelings we experience through a rainbow of colors. The book also offers a collection of personal anecdotes on how we attribute our feelings and emotions to colors and the experiences or memories they trigger. The book makes light of the matter and provides some sense of humor. The beautiful photographs add vivid images to the specific colors mentioned in the book.

The Colors We Feel sheds some light on feelings we experience through a rainbow of colors. The book also offers a collection of personal anecdotes on how we attribute our feelings and emotions to colors and the experiences or memories they trigger. The book makes light of the matter and provides some sense of humor. The beautiful photographs add vivid images to the specific colors mentioned in the book.

Several years ago, I enrolled in a graduate course on educational research that focused on closing the achievement gap for African-American children. The course was structured to explore issues, causes and concerns for the achievement gap. Studying different educational outcomes, reading books and articles, we regularly shared our insights about some leading causes. Most importantly, we were instructed to stay within our subject areas when finding any contributions to that gap. In my attempt to complete the assignment of researching possible causes, in my discipline of art education, I found myself frustrated and angry. Why? There were no research studies exploring how art education was a part of the equation leading to solutions in closing the gap. In addition, there were no basic instructions or curricula designed to make connections to the art student to develop critical thinking skills or to incorporate the use of students’ life experiences for learning. Furthermore, I felt that art education was used as a testing ground in urban schools, like the Chicago Public Schools using Teaching Artists to teach art with no teaching certification or teaching qualifications (Booth, 2003). The purpose of this approach was to use their knowledge and practices of art to influence change in students’ learning. This kind of experiment branched away from any real effort to integrate art education and truly recognize it as a viable core subject area. While conducting research for the course, I found that researchers defined the achievement gap between white and African-American students solely in terms of the four core subjects of math, science, social studies, and language arts, with no attention given to art education (e.g., Berlak, 2001, Honig, 2001, Limn, 2000, Sacks, 2000). A study by the National Black Caucus entitled Closing the Achievement Gap: Improving Education Outcomes for African American Children (November, 2001) reports: Make improving the literacy skills of students a top priority. Students who cannot read will experience little success in school. Reading is the key to academic achievement in every subject, ranging from math and English to science and history. We must put reading first by finding initiatives and programs designed to strengthen the reading skills of students, particularly low-performing students. Again, there was no mention of art. As both an African-American and an art teacher, I found it very disturbing that the recommendations of many national and local art educational organizations and schools failed to address the importance of teaching art education in African-American urban school settings. My dissertation research ultimately arose from this concern.

Chapter 1 focuses on my early childhood development in elementary school and how I used my environment as a tool for learning. My autobiographical narrative begins with a description of how I integrated art education concepts establishing a method for learning. Applying those self-taught methods and concepts, I became proficient in the four core subject areas and succeeded in school. The most significant obstacle that I encountered in my life, at this time, was the fact I lived in a high poverty area, also known as “The Projects”. Most minorities are cut off from information, skills, and guidance that will prepare them for the pursuit of their desires to learn while living in a poverty area. Moving from elementary to the junior high school, my learning environment changed. Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools, I was bused to the neighboring school which was located in a predominantly white and more affluent neighborhood. This experience showed me the stark disparity between higher qualities of educational learning environment versus the destitution of living in a ghetto! While in junior high my educational art integration methods were slowed by national conflicts and catastrophic deaths of famous African-American people and the burning cities in the late 1960s’. These were my first encounters of how race relationships were so important to learning. In spite of the conflicts and tragedies around me, I was determined to remain focused on my education. I used art as a coping mechanism to deal with the events that surrounded me, and I came to understand the value of art as a way of learning.During this time, I continually searched for the one teacher who would understand and endorse my use of art as a way of learning. The interesting thing about this search is that although I found several teachers like this in elementary and middle school, they were nowhere to be found in high school, college, and graduate school. I explain how this lack of guidance and understanding affected my academic success and achievements. With the school culture, social environment and unhappy classroom experiences, school became an illusion of unwanted relationships. For example, I was known more for my athletic abilities than for my unique artistic integrations in my learning, which I found extremely frustrating. While I enjoyed the attention that I received as an athlete, I longed for that one teacher or professor who would notice or appreciate the way I used art in my learning. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of my employment as an art teacher and how I began to integrate art with the four core subject areas. All I needed was a place in which to put my theories into practice. My first opportunity came when I was hired to teach at a boys’ home for underprivileged African-American adolescents who were wards of the state and were at risk of academic failure. My strategies were extremely successful. Later, as an art instructor for adult education, I continued to conduct more strategies to refine my teaching skills. I also describe in some detail, other positions that allowed me the opportunity to gain more knowledge in art education, use my strategies and attain my certification of teaching art education. Chapter 3 consists of for my search for new ways to use art education for the purpose of teaching across the curriculum. This process began with my vision that all art teachers teach across the curriculum. I believe that a common set of standards, language and curriculum in art education can help teachers assess children’s knowledge and skills. To accomplish this vision, it was imperative for me to attend workshops designed for teachers in the other core subject areas. While attending these workshops I would collect evidence that proved or disproved my strategies of the connections between art education and the core subject area. For example, attending a writing/reading workshop for language arts was particularly interesting and useful. The instructor had given us a writing assignment that caused a deep reflective regression to my childhood that had long been forgotten. This regression took me back to my heartbreaking childhood, making me revisit and review a time of despair. It was difficult for me to complete this writing assignment, but my instructors were so impressed my story that they got it published in a national writing journal. Chapter 4 the review of the literature, that serves as a bridge between my personal story as an art educator and the broader field of art education. It focuses on the failure of schools to adopt a common approach to Art Education, discusses the problems of Discipline-based Art Education (DBAE), the shortcomings of Teaching Artists, and misuses of technology. It is divided into three sections. In the first section, I present a detailed inventory of different national art educational organization’s support of Fine Arts and not Art Education. In the second section, I describe the current practices in the classroom and how these national and local organizations give more financial support to those teachers who support and follow their methods of teaching art education. In the third section, I discuss the history and present use of technology in the art educational classrooms. Researching how technology is used in the classroom was extremely useful as a vehicle for elaborating my own beliefs, concepts, and practices today.Chapter 5 includes an in-depth description of my current art pedagogy. I describe and evaluate three cross-curricular lessons that I have used with my students, providing vivid examples of how the core subjects can be taught in an art classroom. The first lesson was the defining of Art and Art Based Education so students can understand, comprehend, apply the strategies of art integration and learn the differences between them. The second lesson was about two point perspective and soft pastels. Students learn about the different views of perspective while constructing boxes, then coloring them with soft pastels. The third lesson was to create a Children’s Storybook in a collaborative effort by students working in groups of three. Each student was assigned to one of three parts for completing the book which are the Artist, Author and Editor.Currently, there is a lot of resistance through my research that I have found it difficult to believe that there is no substantial literature on the idea of integrating “art” into the content areas; no one talks about integrating the content areas into art classes.Art educators tends to advocate for the status of art as a common area in it’s own right with it own unique methods of knowledge and skills base that students should learn from art teachers. Furthermore, there is a lot of resistance to my idea among art teachers, who feel that integrating the content areas into art class will detract from the teaching of art. I’m suggesting since there is nothing out there, that my research may prove to be quite original. Since I am the object of this study, it is a humbling feeling and an honor to share my story through personal narratives from childhood to adulthood. I hope to bring a clear perspective on an art education proposal that draws the national organizations and local art educators together. My vision is to create a common language for art education and improve the ways in which art is experienced by urban school students.

Several years ago, I enrolled in a graduate course on educational research that focused on closing the achievement gap for African-American children. The course was structured to explore issues, causes and concerns for the achievement gap. Studying different educational outcomes, reading books and articles, we regularly shared our insights about some leading causes. Most importantly, we were instructed to stay within our subject areas when finding any contributions to that gap. In my attempt to complete the assignment of researching possible causes, in my discipline of art education, I found myself frustrated and angry. Why? There were no research studies exploring how art education was a part of the equation leading to solutions in closing the gap. In addition, there were no basic instructions or curricula designed to make connections to the art student to develop critical thinking skills or to incorporate the use of students’ life experiences for learning. Furthermore, I felt that art education was used as a testing ground in urban schools, like the Chicago Public Schools using Teaching Artists to teach art with no teaching certification or teaching qualifications (Booth, 2003). The purpose of this approach was to use their knowledge and practices of art to influence change in students’ learning. This kind of experiment branched away from any real effort to integrate art education and truly recognize it as a viable core subject area. While conducting research for the course, I found that researchers defined the achievement gap between white and African-American students solely in terms of the four core subjects of math, science, social studies, and language arts, with no attention given to art education (e.g., Berlak, 2001, Honig, 2001, Limn, 2000, Sacks, 2000). A study by the National Black Caucus entitled Closing the Achievement Gap: Improving Education Outcomes for African American Children (November, 2001) reports: Make improving the literacy skills of students a top priority. Students who cannot read will experience little success in school. Reading is the key to academic achievement in every subject, ranging from math and English to science and history. We must put reading first by finding initiatives and programs designed to strengthen the reading skills of students, particularly low-performing students. Again, there was no mention of art. As both an African-American and an art teacher, I found it very disturbing that the recommendations of many national and local art educational organizations and schools failed to address the importance of teaching art education in African-American urban school settings. My dissertation research ultimately arose from this concern.

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