Artistic Teaching from the “Laboratory Situation” to the Study Project

A Practice Field for Research-led Arts Education in Elementary Schools

Abstract

How do students of arts education find research questions or research topics to be investigated within the scope of study projects? Is it possible to raise awareness of the special features of artistic teaching and learning in elementary school as an essential precondition for both the practical component in schools and the research component of the university course’s placement semester? Following the integration model of the University of Bielefeld, this contribution addresses how practice-led teaching in the arts can meet these challenges in the field of art. Joint teaching projects allow for students of either programmes to gain experience before their placement semester starts. In the laboratory situation of a ChildrenArtMusic workshop, which offers protected and inspiring space for professionalising, future art teachers acquire an attitude of enquiring and researching by reflecting on teaching and learning situations as well as their results. During this process within both led and observed lessons, students are likely to come across topics for their study project. Children’s artistic creations, in particular, prove to be stimulating because their visual approaches to the world are highly valuable in primary school as they can equally raise and answer questions relevant to arts education. With a studyproject based on teaching results, each step is documented from the perception of a phenomenon and concretisation of the question to the design of a lesson sequence that matcheswith the chosen method. Both implementation and evaluation of the project as well as its contextualisation within the frame of didactic theories are discussed next to reasons for the need to bridge the university laboratory situation with the practice of arts education in schools.