This proposal stems from an ongoing 3-year research project titled Transforming Arts Education in English in the Valencian Context, which takes place in a multilingual system, where English is introduced from the very first year of Primary Education as a vehicular language usually in Arts & Crafts (75% of Valencian schools). The project is conducted by a mixed research group formed by 3 Arts Education researchers, 2 Language Education researchers and 4 Arts in English primary teachers. Its focus is on teacher training and the conceptualisation of the specific relation between Arts and English for Primary Education, and uses a multimodal research methodology, combining action-research methods (Ander-Egg, 2003) with Arts-based methods (Barone & Eisner, 2012) in order to mirror in the research process the dual nature of the object of study. Within this general framework, this presentation will focus on the reflective and formative process that the mixed research team has gone through.
One of the practical objectives of the project are four didactic proposals of Arts in English aimed at Primary Education and inspired by four particular pieces of Valencian contemporary art (Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana-CMCV, 2018, 2019, 2020), following Artistic Methodologies of Education (Roldán, Marín-Viadel & Rubio Fernández, 2021). These were elaborated by the mixed research team during artistic experimentation and didactisation sessions, then implemented by the four teachers with all their students (around 700 students in total from 6 to 11 y.o.). Before and during the implementation, the mixed research team held joint discussions and reflective practice sessions. All this process was documented through recordings and photographs, yielding verbal and visual data. From all that body of data, images will be selected to create visual pairs (see below for an example) to trigger sessions of visual elicitation (Pauwels, 2015), which will then be contrasted with the verbal data obtained through recordings and observation notes. The research questions guiding the sessions of visual elicitation will be the following:
How did the particular research design of the project inform the practice of the teachers?
How and where do teachers see the verbal language and their deployment of strategies in the visual data collected from their classroom practice?
How do teachers perceive the effects of applying the four didactic proposals in children's learning of English and Arts?
This presentation will analyse the results of the visual elicitation sessions and discuss the implications of such results in terms of teacher training and research design.
Avariento, M. (2022) Seeing and drawing through. Visual pair composed of, left, Presenting materials, photograph; and right, Detail. Using materials, photograph.
Ander-Egg, E. (2003). Repensando la Investigación-Acción social participativa. Lumen Humanitas.
Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts based research. Sage.
CMCV. (2018, 2019, 2020). Art contemporani de la Generalitat Valenciana. Primers moments. II & III. València: Institut Valencià de Cultura.
Pauwels, L. (2015). Reframing Visual Social Science. Towards a more Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.
Roldán, J., Marín-Viadel, R., & Rubio Fernández, A. (2021). Metodologías artísticas de enseñanza (MAE) de las artes visuales. In Marín-Viadel et al., La enseñanza de las Artes Visuales en contextos de riesgo de exclusión social. Editorial Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras.
