Do children’s festivals encourage better arts education in schools?
Australia/January 25, 2023/ By: Celina Lei*/Source: https://www.artshub.com.au/
As DreamBIG Children’s Festival returns to thrill kids and families, we consider whether this impact can translate into the classroom.
Adelaide Festival Centre’s DreamBIG Children’s Festival returns from 17-27 May 2023 and, for the first time, its opening concert involving 1200 students from 15 schools alongside dance by Dusty Feet Mob will be live-streamed into classrooms across South Australia.
So what sort of impact will this have on arts education in schools, a subject that is often treated as complementary to academically graded ones such as numeracy and literacy?
DreamBIG Co-Creative Producer, Georgi Paech tells ArtsHub: ‘We have a really strong relationship with the Department for Education to create a teaching and learning resource that gets distributed to every school in South Australia. Teachers can come to an event at the festival and they basically have a guidebook as to how to translate what students have done at the festival into their classrooms and units of the curriculum.’
It is exactly this resource for teachers that will encourage better integration of arts education into schools, says Melissa Newton-Turner, a Doctor of Education candidate at QUT, drama educator and consultant, and long-term friend of Paech.
‘The linchpin on how much of an impact live theatre experiences will have on a child’s arts education is really to do with the teacher, and the partnership they have with the arts organisation,’ Newton-Turner tells ArtsHub.
She adds: ‘What makes festivals like DreamBIG and Brisbane’s Out of the Box Festival good is how they communicate and engage with the education sector and the teachers.’
Her research centres on creative partnerships between the education sector and professional theatre companies, especially at the primary school level where teachers are generalists and responsible for the students’ entire curriculum.
Newton-Turner continues: ‘Past research has shown that teachers are often given the administrative role in these engagements, where the focus is put on students and their experiences. But it can be made so much better if the teacher feels confident and is capable of actually engaging the children in the experience.’
Paech adds: ‘I think that a lot of arts organisations are understanding in order to engage schools, they need to create resources and make it really attractive. It’s not just for schools to come and tick a box, but [about] how can the experiences build on the students’ learning?’
Children’s festivals can help open doors and provide better access to arts experiences and, in a way, they have a role of advocacy to highlight the impact that art can have on students for both schools and parents. However, there are still a lot of obstacles when it comes to advocating for arts education in schools.
Integrated learning and a place for the arts
Newton-Turner is all for integrated learning to bring arts into different aspects of the school curriculum, such as role plays for literature or geography, but she emphasises that ‘it cannot be a handmaiden to those other subject areas’.
‘While the arts can absolutely complement a science, English or geography unit, it can’t be done at the expense of learning the rigour of what drama [or visual arts] is. Unfortunately, that’s what we are seeing across the board.’
The thing that is holding back implementing a more rigorous arts education in schools, especially at the primary level, comes down to teacher confidence.
Newton-Turner continues: ‘A lot of institutions around our country do not dedicate time to arts education to pre-service teachers. At the tertiary level, very little is done towards preparing these teachers to teach the arts in the classroom.’
Paech adds: ‘That’s something that I’m interested in exploring for future festivals: how can we give generalist teachers who don’t have a background in the arts the tools to feel confident in teaching different areas of art in their classes?’
Currently DreamBIG offers a range of teaching and learning resources for teachers to make the most out of the festival experience – this year with the theme Our World – developed in partnership with Department for Education. Included are ways to design effective learning, and build deeper connection with the program and its theme, as well as ideas for classroom activities.
Internationally, Australia is actually one of the top countries when it comes our arts education offerings. This may seem like a reason to celebrate but, as it appears, the bottom line is very, very low – in some places, art subjects are non-existent.
Paech can speak to this experience, having studied in France from the age of seven and returned to Australia in year nine. She quotes the absence of the arts in her primary school years as one of the reasons why she feels so passionately about it now.
School education without the arts can be incredibly grim, and alarming not just for students but society as a whole, says Newton-Turner. ‘My concern is that we are creating really one-dimensional education, meaning that we are creating one-dimensional citizens now and for the future. Some kids grow up to be teachers and if they’re not being taught a breadth of learning including the arts, then guess what’s going to happen to our next generation of students?
‘There’s a beautiful quote from an English novelist Philip Pullman. He says, “Children need to go to the theatre as much as they need to run about in fresh air… The difficulty of persuading grown-up people about this is that if you deprive children of shelter and kindness and food and drink and exercise, they die visibly; whereas if you deprive them of art and music and story and theatre, they perish on the inside, and it doesn’t show.”
‘For arts festivals to have an impact in the classroom, it’s really about the teachers’ confidence, the teachers who are filling this space in the curriculum to honour that,’ Newton-Turner concludes.
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