Wherever we are in society, we are surrounded by the Arts. This text has been designed by artists, and the words you read are just visual artworks representing the oral storytelling foundation of all societies. Its layout was designed by artists, using multiple media forms. You are reading it in an environment where the soundscape will hopefully allow you to concentrate. Your body is probably positioned to minimise discomfort and maximise efficiency, while communicating your current state of thought to all those around you (whether consciously or not). Surrounding you may be posters, objects, noises, people interacting with facial expressions, probably some communicating via Facebook, Instagram or other social media using increasingly advanced technologies. The Arts power our lives, yet too often we power down children as they enter formal education (preschool and upwards), stifle their natural forms of communication and interaction, and slowly destroy their ability to be creative and to think diversely.

This chapter will provide a foundation for the provision of quality visual arts educational experiences in early childhood and the primary years. Practical suggestions for planning a high-quality visual arts program are linked to recent theory in a way that helps you construct your own visual arts program. Visual arts concepts, language, elements and principles will be defined and explained, with examples of the progression in visual arts education from early childhood through the primary years. Practicalities such as classroom management, safety and materials are addressed and additional interactive material can be found through the icons.

O’Casey found solace in the home of the founder and patron, as well as the most prolific and popular playwright, of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory. It might not have been expected that, during the 1920s, the owner of the grand estate of Coole Park would befriend a manual labourer who worked on the Dublin railways. But in that decade Lady Gregory and O’Casey became close acquaintances, and she proved to be one of the figures who most encouraged and developed his playwriting. This chapter examines the mentoring and friendship that Gregory provided to O’Casey, and emphasises her wider influence upon him, which has tended to be underplayed in the years after her death.

Percy Shelley’s interest in the visual arts (painting and sculpture, but also monuments and landscapes) was much heightened by the years spent in Italy, where in letters and notebooks, he records a wide range of encounters and sharpened his powers of observation, perception, and description. This chapter presents several important contexts and instances, from accounts in his letters to Thomas Love Peacock of the paintings in Bologna that particularly moved him (such as Raphael’s St. Cecilia), to his ekphrastic verses on a painting of the head of Medusa, to his wide-ranging descriptive notes on sculptures in Rome and in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These are situated historically in terms of increased access to, and engagement with, the visual arts in the period, and as important sites for Shelley to work through the imaginative transmutation of the visual into the visionary in his own poetry and poetic theory.

Papal patronage has often been limited to the question of whether this or that pope loved art. Yet, the pontiff was only one of several actors involved in the realization of artistic projects symbolizing the Church’s cultural, religious, and political power. Papal patronage, in the sense of conflating the roles of initiator, commissioner, and financial backer, only came into its own after 800. At the same time, a long-lasting debate, rooted in the Classical discourse on luxuria and magnificentia, focused on the legitimacy of spending Church money on material beauty. This was resolved around 1500 when papal patronage became framed as magnificentia and charity, in line with the concept of “evergetism,” or collective service to society. This led to an active papal policy to use the arts, in conjunction with Counter Reformation visual propaganda, to strengthen the Faith, with an important impact on artistic developments primarily during the early modern period.

This chapter provides a critical review of the blossoming of Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a research field in the early 21st century. Arguing that the LL itself is at least as old as written language, the chapter examines the multiple sources of contemporary LL research in such fields as onomastics, the visual arts, language policy and planning, and examinations of the social and linguistic outcomes of multilingualism, globalisation, and population movement. The chapter argues that the field of LL research did not stem from any one source, but instead developed from bringing together researchers from different interests and parts of the world. The chapter reviews terminology in the field from English and French, and argues for the use of LL as one which is broad enough to include a wide range of modes of expressing meaning, but retains a focus on language that gives it a distinct conceptual identity.

This chapter presents the exemplary curricula of five academics whose work reflects some of the key ideas in decolonization: Even if some of them are reluctant to use the term itself as an adequate descriptor for their efforts at transforming knowledge at their universities. The disciplines in focus are political science (politics), philosophy, psychology, media studies, and the visual arts. A key finding is that these innovations existed in institutional enclaves before the decolonization moment and that they remain exceptional rather than commonplace in the university curriculum.

Learning in the arts is distinct from most other subjects for three reasons. First, the arts are centrally a representational domain and learning in the arts involves becoming aware of how representational choices communicate meaning to different audiences. Second, form and meaning are integrated; artistic representations are saturated with meaning, and subtle variations are consequential to that meaning. Third, work in the arts involves examining identify and culture, because artistic cognition is intertwined with both. This chapter argues that these three distinct features of arts learning have implications for our understanding of learning more generally. The chapter reviews four types of research: (1) how the arts have been studied in educational settings; (2) how learning occurs in different arts including music and visual arts; (3) the key features of arts learning: the role of the audience, critique, authentic assessment, and role taking; (4) how an arts-based perspective can contribute to our understanding of learning in all subjects.

Examines the reception of the canonical gospels and of their ‘effects’ in particular times and places. Here, the first part gives an account of reception history as a relatively new discipline in gospel studies, while the second part offers as a case study some of the ways in which the synoptic stories of the women who visit the tomb of Jesus have been represented in the visual arts.

“This chapter analyses Kurdish cultural and artistic work. For much of the twentieth century, Kurdish cultural and artistic productions were repressed by the assimilationist policies the states of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria adopted with respect of their Kurdish population. One of the most intriguing contributions of this chapter is its emphasis on artistic and cultural production within the actual political arena, interrogating how it contributes to the transformation of the new Kurdish subjectivity that situates itself across borders. The questions underpinning this research investigate how through counter-cultural and artistic efforts create or rather recreate a cognitive territory of an oppressed people.Artistic production for Kurds signifies the memory of a stateless people and a decolonial aesthetic trying to survive amids the hegemony of the dominant national cultures and the traumas of the repression of Kurdish micro-culture. Hence, analysing the participation of contemporary artists and producers in the Kurdish area in the midst of conflict and violence enables us to highlight the emancipatory capacity of their work. During the 1990s and 2000s, theatre, music, cinema festivals began to be held in European countries, which also extended to the four parts of the Kurdish territories, leading to the propagation of both intergenerational and trans-border artistic and cultural activities. This reterritorialization of Kurdish counter-cultural memory may not be a renaissance of Kurdish cultural production but instead should be considered a cultural serhildan.”

Ibsen, who originally wanted to be a painter, came of age at a time when theatre and painting were still considered closely connected art forms. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, painters would paint scenes from plays, and playwrights would create plays inspired by paintings. In their salons, the aristocracy admired pictorial performances known as ‘attitudes’ or ‘living sculptures’ and staged tableaux vivants, theatrical enactments of famous paintings. The constant interaction between the ‘sister arts’ created an aesthetic environment in which it felt natural to think about paintings in dramatic terms and about drama in painterly terms. Thus Ibsen was inspired by painters such as the English Pre-Raphaelites and the Swiss Arnold Böcklin.

Throughout his career, from relatively early works like ‘Terje Vigen’ and Peer Gynt to modern plays like The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen included traditional painterly tableaux in his works. But modernism swept away the idea of ‘sister arts’. Although Ibsen never abandoned his traditional understanding of painting, this chapter shows that in his contemporary plays his traditional visual aesthetics emerges as a seamless part of a new, radically modern vision.

Stanislavsky’s artistic development is tracked in its various phases during the years preceding the 1917 Revolution and according to his strongest affinities and the most important influences that he absorbed into his guiding principles for the Moscow Art Theatre. Attention is focused on Abramtsevo, the artistic colony and utopian community founded by Savva Mamontov, a family friend and significant part of the habitus that shaped Stanislavsky’s cultural attitudes and tastes. It is at Abramtsevo and also at Mamontov’s Private Opera Theatre in Moscow that Stanislavsky saw communal artistic aspirations in action and how leading visual artists, composers and singers, notably Chaliapin, combined their different talents and skills, providing him with reference points for his ensemble theatre and its aim for harmoniously integrated productions.

Related inspiration to do with Old Believer Orthodoxy and its values, Tolstoy’s beliefs, Sulerzhitsky’s Tolstoyan perspectives, Vrubel’s mystical paintings and Scriabin’s ecstatic music, along with numerous other experiences of the Russian Silver Age, not least Mikhaïl Chekhov’s stage experiments, contextualize and illuminate Stanislavsky’s theatre work in its fullest sense. Sociopolitical factors similarly situate Stanislavsky’s endeavours in the first ‘half’ of his life in art.