International Journal of Education & the Arts

“Intervention on a String” sought to examine puppets and puppetry in the education domain. This research project sought to examine puppets in the classroom to see if their inclusion helped raise levels of student engagement, socialisation, and participation. Moreover, this project sought to understand how and why puppets, as pedagogical tools, might foster communication and social skills that help build relationships and potentially increase self-esteem in young people.

Puppets have been used throughout the ages for entertainment as well as for the transmission of cultural stories, histories, and traditions, and have been described as an effective means of communicating with children (Bernier & O’Hare, 2005; Blumenthal, 2005; Sposito et al., 2016). However, an extensive examination of the literature surrounding puppets and puppetry in education showed that there is little research-based evidence surrounding their educational impact and benefits (Krögera & Nupponen, 2019).

In a challenging world, the spotlight on children’s wellbeing has strengthened. There is extensive research about the ways in which well-designed arts education programs positively impact children’s wellbeing. Despite this, arts education continues to be marginalised in schools. When researchers with arts education and leadership experience teamed up to consider the intransient nature of the resistance to arts education in primary/elementary schools, they conducted a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to see if this offered new insights. The iterative process of sharing and interrogating personal stories to distil collective meanings (themes) highlighted four features of education programs that provide sustained support for children’s wellbeing: centering in a discordant world; effective leadership; experiential processes, engagement, and trust; and harnessing the transformative potential of the arts. The CAE also pointed the team towards conducting future inquiries about the currently under-researched role of the school principal in instigating cultural change that sustains meaningful arts education.

This paper examines the interplay of creativity, education, and the expressive arts. We begin by presenting a narrative literature review focusing on the use of artistic tools to promote creativity, self-expressiveness, and meaningful aspects of emotional and social learning. This review reveals strong connections between the different components of this interplay, and a special attention is given to the use of arts to promoting creativity and meaningful learning. We then propose the Empowering Creative Education Model (ECEM), which aims to provide a practical framework for employing artistic tools in each of the model's four developmental circles: I, Us, Educational and Community. Each of the four circles includes unique aspects of personal development.

Creativity and design thinking skills are considered pillars in arts practice in general. Traditional arts education, in particular, involves a tension between pure technical skill and the ability to design creatively regardless of craft limitations. The present study focuses on eliminating the boundaries between craft and art and bridging the gap between technical skills and creativity in practicing traditional textile printing arts. The paper presents a teaching procedure that is based on exploring traditional textile printing within a new dimension and achieving a balance between both the technical and creative sides. The study proposes a survey model to investigate the impact of the applied procedures and understand students' perceptions of the full range of the traditional printing creative process in action. The conclusions of this study will aid in the development of traditional arts education and practice in general and their re-exploration as flexible, expressive, and creative forms of art.

In this study, we frame learning in the tertiary-level contemporary dance class as a process of developing culturally situated shared patterns of skilled action and attention through dynamic engagement with kinetic experience. Extending existing scholarship on dance learning, we adopt the framework of cultural affordances to understand the developmental relationship between physical and general categories of attention during the learning process. Based on qualitative analysis of student and teacher interviews, we contend that the dance classes were laboratories in which cross-domain mapping (physical and general) was leveraged to develop students’ kinetic and attentional skills. Understood in this way, the physical concepts and the general concepts worked in a helical fashion, cycling through dynamic engagement with kinetic experience and the development of attentional awareness, not as pure repetition, but as a progression toward more complex, skilled, and nuanced ways of moving.

This article analyses the educational possibilities of art installations in the training of future early childhood and primary school teachers. I start by reviewing the origins of installation art before presenting an experience designed for teachers based on the creation of scale models and installation experiences. Scale model installations constitute a tool for future teachers to explore contemporary artistic creation while fostering creativity and reflection on their role as educators. This study employs a constructivist qualitative methodology using action-based research and a journal to record the progress of the students throughout the project. The initial results demonstrate the educational value of this experience and its potential to generate further educational experiences to explore contemporary art themes and other areas of the curriculum. The use of installation art in education is compatible with a diversity of approaches, materials, and media and opens the door to new lines of research.

This literature review offers compelling evidence for the significant role music and song can play in cultivating student engagement in elementary school science lessons. With students disengaging from science education, there is concern about the lack of necessary scientific literacy skills required in today's world. To explore whether music and song could be used engage students in science we conducted a thorough search of composite education databases for relevant scholarly articles published 1993-2021. Synthesis of the resulting 26 articles revealed four themes: the common goal of engagement, evidence of learning improvement, broad utility of music and songs as pedagogical tools, and limited long-term studies. While acknowledging the limited evidence presented in these articles, we emphasize that incorporating music and song into science lessons not only enriches the educational environment but also contributes to an arts-infused education known to enhance student performance across a wide range of curriculum domains. We recommend further research with a particular focus on investigating the impact of music and song on science engagement and learning over the long-term in elementary school science classrooms.

Book Reviewed: Hendricks, K. S. (2023). The Oxford handbook of care in music education. Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197611654.001.0001

Book reviewed: Dickson, L., Murray, S., & Riddell, J. (2023). Shakespeare’s guide to hope, life, and learning. Univeristy of Toronto Press.