Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

More documents

Recommendations

Info

have well-equipped specialist rooms for textile, woodcraft and computer design. There appears to be readily available arts resources such as paint and paper and musical instruments. In most schools, fundraising by parents supports arts programmes by providing such ‘extras’ as theatre or other visits and additional resources. None of the schools visited felt that they lacked adequate resources to deliver quality arts programmes, though some concern was expressed that this situation might change in the future. The upper secondary colleges visited were very well-resourced in terms of both rooms and materials. While less common, some schools and colleges also had specialist dance and drama spaces. Music and other after school schools were also very well-equipped with high quality teaching spaces and resources. Some schools have students’ art displayed in the classroom and in publicly accessible parts of the school, but the range and standard of these displays varied considerably. While particular schools have well-labelled and carefully presented, dynamic displays of pupils’ work, there is a general lack of emphasis given to public presentation. Public presentation of work is important as research suggests that pupils should be encouraged to produce more ‘resolved’, quality artworks and performances for public presentation. The lack of displays may have been influenced by the timing of the research, with some schools commenting that work was removed over the holiday period, but this seems to not fully explain the lack of presentation of pupils’ work. With a few notable exceptions, there is a lack of displays in and around schools of the pupils’ achievements in the arts. It is a key factor to enhancing quality that work is displayed and presented in a way that accords with professional standards in the field. For example, artworks should be mounted, labelled and hung with an awareness of the curatorial process. Display and presentation should be a key element of textile, woodcraft and design courses. Even in schools that have clear spaces for exhibitions, these are rarely attractively used. For instance in one school, children’s work from 2003 was still on display, despite its yellowed and unappealing appearance. There appears to be a trend in more recently built schools towards making very flexible use of the school facilities. For example, schools may be designed around large shared spaces instead of classrooms. Similarly, classes might be grouped to enable flexible and ‘team’ teaching. Multi-age classes were also apparent. Teachers appeared to enjoy working flexibility. This had generally encouraged more creative learning, though a small but significant number of teachers felt that more ‘open’ classes may have actually decreased creativity as teachers working in more open rooms were concerned by “disturbing other teachers” and felt “desk work” was “easier to manage” than creative work. 28
Increasingly, schools are becoming more multi-function community centres and may be designed to also house the music school, cultural centre, library, pre-primary schools and other community services. Schools with the music and/or arts schools embedded appeared to be very successful with higher numbers of pupils attending the optional arts education and greater flexibility of space, time and teaching personnel. Conversely, some teachers – especially from the Music Schools – were against the trend towards embedding the music school within the regular school, claiming that this influenced the special “ethos” and “feel” possible in a separate music school facility. Similarly, while having high quality specialist rooms for the arts was generally viewed as being a good thing, a number of specialist teachers felt that the arts room isolated them from other teachers and made their work appear to be peripheral to the main function of the school. While there were only a few examples of specialist arts teacher working alongside the other subject teachers, there was a desire expressed by many arts teachers for their work to be more integrated into the general school. In Iceland, the vast majority of parents send their children to the nearest local school. While in Reykjavik and other larger towns, some choice may be possible, there appears to be high levels of satisfaction with – and support of – the local school by parents and the community. 1.9 Preschools ‣ Arts and cultural activities are given a high priority in preschools Throughout the country there are a range of preschools and childcare centres. These are highly diverse, but all appear to offer a very high level of care in a creative environment. They make maximum use of their community and children are encouraged to learn in harmony with the environment. These centres generally operate a very creative curriculum. Following are vignettes which provide insight into the implementation of the arts and creative curricula in different preschool settings. Figure 1.9.1 shows the high level of inclusion of the arts in preschools: Figure 1.9.1 Arts education in preschools 29
Page 1 and 2: Arts and Cultural Education in Icel
Page 3 and 4: Acknowledgements This research woul
Page 5 and 6: Helga Rut Guðmundsdóttir Helgi Vi
Page 7 and 8: 5.4.2 Talent developement..........
Page 9 and 10: practices, but in reality there are
Page 11 and 12: Chapter 1: Introduction and overvie
Page 13 and 14: school type to which the comment re
Page 15 and 16: A future study could examine specif
Page 17 and 18: The number of pupils with a foreign
Page 19 and 20: pre-primary school teachers were so
Page 21 and 22: Figure 1.5.3: How useful is the Nat
Page 23 and 24: The conclusions from this report in
Page 25 and 26: primary level exceptional students
Page 27: ‣ Schools and colleges should be
Page 31 and 32: here, it is a good cooperation. We
Page 33 and 34: In terms of suggested improvements
Page 35 and 36: There are 300 hundred pupils in thi
Page 37 and 38: Figure 1.12.2 Accessibility of the
Page 39 and 40: e active in a range of local profes
Page 41 and 42: schools have waiting lists of child
Page 43 and 44: Going to local schools… well we t
Page 45 and 46: in theatre. The students really lov
Page 47 and 48: We had a great show. The teachers d
Page 49 and 50: lot of satisfaction out of the proc
Page 51 and 52: Chapter 2 World Benchmarking 2.1 In
Page 53 and 54: Chapter 3: Responses to quality 3.1
Page 55 and 56: Figure 3.2.1 Compulsory school coll
Page 57 and 58: In the survey, dance schools report
Page 59 and 60: The school is participating in the
Page 61 and 62: visitors. The diverse and ‘quirky
Page 63 and 64: A smaller group of girls performs a
Page 65 and 66: Figure 3.3.6 Pupil performances in
Page 67 and 68: way the children’s artworks were
Page 69 and 70: has always been and it is 20 or 30
Page 71 and 72: ‣ Funding should encourage risk t
Page 73 and 74: music sector could be less constrai
Page 75 and 76: Conversely, the accessibility of ou
Page 77 and 78: Vignette 3.7.4 Every day there are
Page 79 and 80:
Despite the geographical challenges
Page 81 and 82:
In visual arts we mainly assess acc
Page 83 and 84:
We try to do professional developme
Page 85 and 86:
This vignette from an academic in t
Page 87 and 88:
in offering adult education. Other
Page 89 and 90:
demanding more of our schools and t
Page 91 and 92:
It was argued that the arts may not
Page 93 and 94:
(teacher a professional photographe
Page 95 and 96:
There is a lot of respect amongst p
Page 97 and 98:
“The popularity of pop music is g
Page 99 and 100:
Others would argue that the connect
Page 101 and 102:
interrelationship with nature and c
Page 103 and 104:
From this summary, it can be seen t
Page 105 and 106:
training of senior secondary arts t
Page 107 and 108:
Vignette 5.2.4 Our selection proces
Page 109 and 110:
There is a lack of connection betwe
Page 111 and 112:
During the research, various school
Page 113 and 114:
The following sections are other as
Page 115 and 116:
For older pupils, there are electiv
Page 117 and 118:
Before I came here no-one was doing
Page 119 and 120:
Creative and cultural industries Mo
Page 121 and 122:
While the previously listed recomme
show all

Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?