Virginia Scotchie’s compact, image-rich manual reads less like a how-to pamphlet and more like a set of curated studio portraits: clear-eyed, practical, and quietly persuasive about the idea that a maker’s workspace is an extension of their thinking. She, herself a practicing ceramist, organizes the book around photographic tours, measured floor plans, and concise commentaries … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Setting Up Your Ceramic Studio: Ideas & Plans from Working Artists by Virginia Scotchie
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
Susan Schwake’s approach in this compact manual is quietly ambitious: deliver fine-art experiences in short, repeatable labs so that a parent, teacher, or small-group leader can run a semester’s worth of explorations with minimal prep and maximum creative payoff. The book is organized as six units (Drawing; Painting; Printmaking; Paper; Mixed Media; plus usage/how-to material) … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The lavish monograph published by Last Gasp and issued as the catalogue to a mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art is more than a handsome picture book: it stages a sustained argument about how “low” imagery—cartoons, B-movies, advertising—can be retooled into a repository for moral satire, visual allegory, and painterly virtuosity. The … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
In Dreamland by Todd Schorr, the picture-book monograph performs a small, wicked miracle: it translates the tactile spectacle of Schorr’s paintings into a narrative argument about American visual fantasy — one in which commercial icons, childhood cartoons, and Old-Master technique collide and breed. The book is both a career statement and a provocation: sumptuous, obscene, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben
Wohlleben’s The Secret Network of Nature is at once a gardener’s field guide to wonder and a polemic about the fragile engineering that sustains life on Earth. The author, already known for his knack at turning ecological detail into intimate storytelling, invites readers to look beneath the familiar surfaces of forests, fields, and shorelines and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben
Revisionist Pedagogy – Integrating Social and News Media Literacy in Pre-Collegial Visual Arts Education: A Comprehensive, Actionable Approach. (… A Comprehensive Approach, v.2)
Integrating social and news media literacy into pre-collegial visual arts education is not an optional add-on — it is a curricular priority. Visual culture now shapes how young people perceive events, form opinions, and participate civically. Arts classrooms are especially well-placed to teach students to read, produce, and ethically evaluate visual content. This essay proposes … Continue reading Revisionist Pedagogy – Integrating Social and News Media Literacy in Pre-Collegial Visual Arts Education: A Comprehensive, Actionable Approach. (… A Comprehensive Approach, v.2)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
Sue Roe’s In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art is a capacious, elegiac portrait of a place and a moment. It threads biography, cultural history, and close-looking criticism to argue that Montmartre — with its cafés, studios, cheap lodgings and convivial degradations — was not merely backdrop but active engine of a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
Revisionist Pedagogy – The Case for Media Literacy in Elementary Education: An Evidence-Based Argument
In an era dominated by digital media, media and information literacy—the competencies to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act with information across media—should be treated as a foundational skill alongside reading and numeracy. International frameworks frame media literacy as a teachable, scaffoldable competency that can and should be embedded into core curricula rather than treated … Continue reading Revisionist Pedagogy – The Case for Media Literacy in Elementary Education: An Evidence-Based Argument
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
Jim Robison’s Slab Techniques is a concise, unpretentious primer that manages the useful trick of being both immediately practical and quietly provocative. Presented as part of the Ceramics Handbooks series, the book lays out slab building not as a single method but as a family of choices — a toolkit of decisions about clay, joinery, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins
Tony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within (first issued in the early 1990s) is, at once, a manifesto, a handbook, and a revival meeting. Framed as a program for total self-mastery, it stitches together memoiristic anecdote, high-velocity exhortation, practical exercises and a bricolage of psychological techniques into a single, capacious work aimed at producing measurable change … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins
The New Renaissance Mindset 