Education in the Arts (3rd Ed), by Sinclair, C, Jeanneret, N, O’Toole, J, Hunter, M, Oxford University Press, 2018, 273 pp.,$74 AUD, ISBN: 978-0-195-52-794-0 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Challenges, implications and the future of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts
The Australian Educational Researcher
This paper will explore the key findings identified in the five arts discipline-specific papers which comprise this special theme issue. Each of the participant researchers have situated Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts within the context of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts and what they characterise as its social justice imperatives. A narrative phenomenological approach has been adopted to enable the participant researchers to socially co-construct an analysis of their experiences working with the Australian Curriculum: The Arts including challenges, implications and the future for their respective discipline areas and the Arts overall. The three key themes from these collective voices revealed a quality arts education is an entitlement for every child and young person; the Arts provide important opportunities for children and young people from diverse backgrounds and cultures to demonstrate their learning, express themselves and participate; and arts educators and the Arts industry need to work together to strengthen community understanding about the value of the Arts in education. This process provided important insights into how exposure and engagement with the Arts shape the ways in which children and young people make meaning in their lives, enhance their overall wellbeing, increase their sense of social responsibility and contribute to a socially-just society.
Illuminating the gap: An overview of classroom-based arts education research in Australia
International Journal of Education Through Art, 2010
Arts education is an internationally recognized term referencing education through the arts. The term arts is seen to encompass different things in different contexts, including but not limited to the performing arts-music, dance, drama, and theatre; visual arts, media, industrial arts, and literary arts. In this article, the authors provide an overview to date of classroom-based arts education research in Australia. In so doing, the 'gap' in the literature describing and discussing classroom-based arts education is illuminated. We call for attendance to classroom-based arts education research in Australia given that the heart of curriculum transfer and transformation is in the classroom. We offer a research methodology and design of practitioner enquiry to empower and enlighten collective knowledge sharing of professional practice. Such attendance will establish a base that can bring about sustained policy and practice change.
2019
Arts education in Western Australian primary schools consists of learning opportunities outlined by mandated curriculum and implemented by classroom and specialist arts teachers in schools. This study considered how, and in what ways, do teachers understand, interpret and enact arts curriculum in Western Australian primary schools? Conducted across three phases of inquiry, this qualitative study used key theoretical constructs from curriculum theory and policy enactment theory to understand the impact of contextual variables on teachers and schools. In phase one, the perspectives of 11 arts curriculum leaders were drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews. Marginalisation of the arts, the disconnection of schools and teachers to the arts, and the limited impact of professional learning were found to have influenced arts teaching and learning in unintended ways. Findings influenced phase two of the research. In phase two, interviews with 24 participants across four schools revea...
Portraits of Quality Arts Education in Australian Primary School Classrooms
2018
The status of arts education in primary schools is, according to the extant literature and popular commentary, infrequent and substandard. A small number of studies reflect on what actually occurs when arts education is taught in primary school classrooms. This thesis presents thick, rich, descriptive portraits of the nature of quality arts education occurring in Australian primary school classrooms. Two case sites were involved in this study – one primary school in Victoria, one in Queensland. Working within the interpretivist paradigm, portraiture methodology was employed, supported by a case-study approach. Crystallization was used as a methodological referent to ensure the validity and reliability of data collection and representation. The nine domains of Bamford and Glinkowski's (2010) Effect and Impact Tracking Matrix (EITM) acted as a scaffold to inform instrument development, data collection, and subsequent data organisation of completed portraits of quality arts educati...
International Handbook of Research on Teachers and …, 2009
Arts Education has the potential to play an increasingly important role in the education of young people around the world. This role includes contributing to the development of young people's critical and creative facility and thereby developing in them cultural, personal and social agency. These abilities can be seen to become increasingly important in times of neo-liberalism, rising fundamentalism, global economic development, critical education, and disposability (Giroux, 2006). Consequently, Arts Education and how it is taught has consequences. What is important to understand, however, is that the role that Arts Education-like all education-plays is contextually defined thereby serving a variety of purposes across schools, communities, states or provinces, and countries. This means that provision varies markedly, that teaching is not solely confined to schools, and the way young people engage with the arts, and for what purposes is changing. For example, while all education is contextually defined, Arts Education particularly is increasingly limited less by geography or specific location and more by access to technology, the influences of economically developed societies, youth culture, and an understanding that school is only one 'mode of delivery' for education. A recent survey of 40 international organizations and countries conducted collaboratively by UNESCO, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA), and the Australia Council for the Arts (OZCO) (Bamford, 2006) highlighted that: the arts are in educational policy around the world; the arts are differentiated in culturally and contextually specific ways with most differences appearing between economically-developed and economically-developing countries; the arts serve a variety of different purposes including learning in the arts, that is developing arts specific knowledge, skills, and processes; and learning through the arts where this knowledge, skills and processes are employed across the curriculum for a variety of purposes. Although not described specifically in the Bamford compendium as a third accepted orientation that crosses boundaries is learning with the arts. In this orientation the arts are employed for a variety of social purposes including identified special populations (c.f. UNESCO.org) and notions of health and well-being (Mills & Brown, 2004).
Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 2013
There is extensive research that shows how the arts provide many benefits for all students yet there is evidence that arts education offerings and experiences are decreasing across both university and school sectors. It is important that we recognize the essential role of teacher educators in preparing pre-service teachers to be aware of the 'bigger picture' of arts education before beginning their work with students. Drawing on interview data from eight tertiary arts educators, this paper will provide a timely national snapshot view of their perceptions. It explores their experiences as arts educators in higher education contexts in regards to the 'state of the arts' at their respective institutions. Together with a narrative inquiry approach, this research investigates deeper, lived experiences of the authors in relation to their experiences as arts educators and offers suggestions for improvement to arts education in teacher education programs.
Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2016
For the most part this book is a report on an ambitious Australian project drawing on the findings of a two-year longitudinal qualitative study led by an educational psychologist, who was the principal investigator, and was supported by a team of researchers. The book results from an Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant in partnership with the Australian Council for the Arts, 2009-2011. The project attempted to study the impact of arts involvement in the academic outcomes of 643 students from 15 schools on the East Coast of Australia in an attempt to investigate what might constitute best practice in learning and teaching in the arts within primary and secondary schools in Australia. The project was entitled "The Role of Arts Education in Academic Motivation, Engagement and Achievement" (AEMEA).