305 research outputs found
Arts-Based Methods in Education Around the World
This multi-method project asks what the arts, in transdisciplinary learning
spaces, can contribute to primary education. We position our work at the
interstices of: (i) the rising wave of interest in, and imperative for, building
sustainable creative futures; (ii) the concept of the Anthropocene which pulls
together ideas of environmental change and the relevance of education for
society; and (iii) allowing pedagogical experimentation across subject boundaries
to broaden learning opportunities for empowering children. Methodologically,
we use the dimensions of an arts-based perceptual ecology, where
direct experience, the magical (a special and exciting quality that makes
something seem different from ordinary things), intuition, imagination, artmaking
and the language of pattern become part of an interconnected learning
system, to explore how children and their teachers co-create possibility spaces
for fostering transdisciplinary learning. Using a sculpture installation as
stimulus, we analyse three sets of transdisciplinary practices enabled by the
co-creation of possibility spaces. The first set of practices featured an artistled
workshop for teachers to engage with an art piece, to think with their
hands and to work with clay as a generative event for planning curriculum
spaces for transdisciplinary activities for their children. In the second set,
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248 The Art of Co-Creating Arts-Based Possibility Spaces for Fostering
children were invited to respond creatively to the art piece and consider the
world as something we make rather than as something we inherit. The third
set featured use of the language of patterns, connecting mathematics and art,
or mathematics and music. We analyze and interpret the practices using an
arts-based perceptual ecology (ABPE) framework from which to see how the
arts, along with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM),
as a ‘bracketed’ concept (STE(A)M), is included, located and functions. We
conclude and offer recommendations for the innovative work of primary
schools as a whole – that is to say, the curriculum, pedagogy and the wider life
of the school – to co-create the spaces for this kind of arts-based perceptual
ecology in enhancing science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics
(STE(A)M).We argue for the ongoing and necessary theorizing of possibility
spaces for arts positioning within STE(A)M education
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