Session Information
Contribution
This presentation examines the conceptualisation, design and implementation of a new creative arts education module at an Irish college of education from teaching and learning perspectives. Mary Immaculate College is a college of education within the University of Limerick, Ireland. As part of a revised Bachelor of Education undergraduate degree in primary teaching, a new creative arts education module was introduced which aimed to more closely align learning outcomes across three subject disciplines of visual arts, music and drama. The presentation outlines the introduction of this creative arts education module from both lecturer and student perspectives. Lecturers from each subject discipline who worked collaboratively on the co-creation and implementation of the module discuss key issues relating to cross-discipline planning and re-imagining of course content and delivery. In particular, ideological dilemmas are problematised as they arose within this planning process. The implications of this approach in terms of individual art-forms is also examined.
The focus of the creative arts module is on the student themselves as learner, all the while acknowledging their future identity and role as a primary teacher. The module seeks to re-engage the student with the art-forms of music, drama and visual art as well as the processes of making, performing and responding to the art-forms. There is a strong focus on confidence-building in their engagement with the arts, and on collaborative learning experiences, primarily in workshop settings which also incorporate new technologies. Student-teachers taking the arts education module construct a personal rationale for the arts which acknowledges their social and collaborative form as well as their artistic and educational functions. This is largely achieved through participatory immersive practical activities across music, visual art and drama.
Findings from student surveys, reflections and interviews are presented examining the student experience of this course and their understanding of broad principles and practices that underpin arts education. In particular, emerging identities as teacher-artists are explored from learning and experiential perspectives. Data exploring assumptions, expectations and challenges of the course are analysed thus providing insight into the impact of the module on preparing students to teach the arts in schools.
The theoretical framework used to conceptualise the study and analyse the data draws from key writerssuchas John Dewey (1934), Maxine Greene (1995, 2001) and Elliot Eisner (2004). Using these theorists, the study advocates for meaningful, ‘real-life’ engagement in the creative arts in order to inspire innovative and imaginative approaches to teaching in schools. In immersing student-teachers in creative arts experiences, the study reveals the importance of active experiences across the arts where “participatory involvement with the many forms of art can enable us to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines have obscured, what habit and convention have suppressed” (Greene, 1995, p. 123).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books. Eisner, E. (2004). The Arts and The Creation Of Mind. CT: Yale University Press. Greene, Maxine (2001). Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Johnson, R. B., Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Turner, L. (2007). Toward a definition of mixed methods research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1 (2), 112-133.
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