As Australia moves towards the implementation of a national curriculum in the Arts a new review of research, released by ACER in January, calls for the Arts to be embedded in all academic disciplines and fields as a way of cultivating creativity and imagination.

Australian Education Review 58, The Arts and Australian Education: Realising potential by University of Sydney academic Professor Robyn Ewing stresses that the Arts (dance, drama, literature, media arts, music and visual arts) must not be seen as servants to other curriculum areas.

The review aims to demonstrate that the Arts offer both a lens into historical and contemporary social issues, as well as simultaneously challenging them. It argues that arts processes can provide the potential to reshape the way learning is conceived and organised in schools and other educational contexts. The Arts can also act as a catalyst for personal and social transformation in schools and the community more generally.

The review in part builds on earlier propositions made by Joanna Wyn in Australian Education Review number 55, Touching the Future: Building skills for life and work, that current approaches to schooling and education (including entrenched inequalities and the privileging of the competitive academic curriculum) cannot equip our students for the flexibility and creativity needed for 21^st century living.

AER 58 highlights international and national research that shows those students whose learning is embedded in the Arts achieve better grades and overall test scores, are less likely to leave school early, rarely report boredom and have more positive self concept than those students who are deprived of arts experiences.

Examples from education and community education programs that embed quality arts processes and experiences demonstrate the potential of the Arts to change the lives of children and young people, particularly those experiencing difficulties.

“Many children opt out of formal learning activities because they cannot see the relevance for them for their own lives, currently as well as potentially,” Professor Ewing writes. “Too often, learning in schools is very different from the learning that happens in children’s everyday worlds.”

Ewing argues in the review that research indicates ensuring that the arts experiences are at the centre of the curriculum can:

• Facilitate students’ active involvement in learning, help them make links with their own knowledge and experiences
• Enable a range of possible meanings to be explored and represented
• Challenge stereotypical assumptions
• Encourage creativity, flexibility and tolerance of ambiguity
• Provide opportunities for students to reflect and dialogue collaboratively
• Take risks and try again when something is unsuccessful – understand that getting things wrong is part of effective learning
• Apply understanding to their own personal context or other contexts.

Engagement in Arts can also have serious social benefits including transforming habits of thinking, seeing and behaving and produce new ways of seeing, knowing and acting in the world. Critical engagement through Arts processes can help us to see things from a different perspective and suggest connections between different phenomena that we did not previously recognise.

“Despite the growing body of evidence pointing to educational and wider social benefits of the Arts, to date equitable provision and resourcing of the Arts and monitoring teaching quality in arts education has received insufficient attention in Australia,” Professor Ewing writes.  

Many successful arts programs have been established by philanthropic groups. Professor Ewing argues that such initiatives should be the province of government through both educational and broader social policy. She calls upon Australian governments to invest in high-quality arts education initiatives as well as high-quality research and evaluation of these initiatives.

According to Professor Ewing achieving the demonstrated educational and social benefits of Arts in education will require a change in thinking by policy makers to ensure that cultivating imagination and creativity become the priorities rather than ‘add-ons’.

Professor Ewing claims that “provision of quality teacher preparation in the Arts and ongoing professional learning has been almost nonexistent.”

It will also be necessary to invest in ongoing professional development for early career and experienced teachers to help them develop expertise and confidence to use arts processes and experiences in their teaching.

Professor Ewing notes that up until the last five years, systematic, large-scale longitudinal research studies about the impact of learning about and through the Arts have been lacking in Australia. She argues that longitudinal quantitative and qualitative research methods are needed to develop a rich understanding of the effects of a teaching and learning program on participants. This is even more so with understanding the type and depth of social impacts such programs have on individuals and communities.

There are workforce, funding and resource implications that will also need close attention if the Arts are to be a core curriculum component in schools. Learning in, through and about the Arts must become a priority for both pre-service courses and ongoing professional learning for in-service teachers.

Both governments and tertiary institutions must re-consider the initial preparation of all teachers to give them confidence to embed the Arts in their teaching and learning practices. Funding and other systemic arrangements for ongoing professional development to enable both generalist and arts teachers to continue to update their knowledge and develop their expertise and skills must therefore be prioritised.

“It will be important for policy-makers and those developing the new national curriculum to seriously consider the evidence and stances adopted in this review,” Professor Ewing concludes.  

Robyn Ewing is Professor of Teacher Education and the Arts at the University of Sydney. Her teaching, research, publications and extensive work in schools include the use of drama with literature to enhance students’ English and literacy outcomes.

Australian Education Review number 58, The Arts and Australian Education: Realising potential, by Robyn Ewing with a foreword by John O’Toole, Foundation Chair of Arts Education at the University of Melbourne and currently lead writer for The Australian Curriculum: The Arts is available for download from the ACER website at http://www.acer.edu.au/aer. Print copies can be purchased from ACER Press. Contact customer service on 1800 338 402 or via email on .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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