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Children’s Learning through the Arts
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The Arts significantly boost student achievement, reduce discipline problems, and increase the odds students will go on to graduate from college. As First Lady Michelle Obama sums up, both she and the President believe ‘strongly that Arts education is essential for building innovative thinkers who will be our nation’s leaders for tomorrow’.
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Arne Duncan, Former U.S. Secretary of Education
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The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) outlines the purpose of early years education as engaging and developing the whole child. The ‘whole child’ concept encompasses children’s beliefs and values, their inner world of the mind, imagination and spirit, their personality and physical capabilities, and their social and cultural world. The goal of engaging and developing the whole child is expressed in EYLF in terms of children’s belonging, being and becoming. The expectations of the school curriculum are outlined in the Australian Curriculum and cover the early childhood schooling years of Foundation to Year 3. In the Australian Curriculum, the Arts is one of the compulsory Learning Areas. ‘The Arts’ in this context means Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts. The goal of the curriculum in the Arts Learning Area is to engage children in exploring, creating, expressing ideas and communicating through the various embodied, multimodal and practical ways provided by the Arts. The EYLF promotes a play-based approach to learning, which, with its emphasis on child-centred learning through discovery and inquiry, is reflected in the precepts of Arts Education and the expectations of the Arts Learning Area in the Australian Curriculum. While there is a growing focus in education circles on literacy, numeracy and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, it is important to remember that a learning program rich in arts engagement contributes significantly to children’s learning and their development as individuals: their sense of self, their agency, their wellbeing and their dispositions for learning. In Part 1 we explore what children’s learning through the Arts looks like. We begin in Chapter 1 by outlining the expectations of EYLF and the Australian Curriculum, in order to provide a context for the propositions in this text. In Chapter 2, we describe the features of arts-based learning. In Chapter 3, we describe how engagement in the Arts contributes to the development of the whole child in a sociocultural context. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, we take each of the EYLF framing ideas to show how learning through the Arts offers a powerful model for children’s belonging, being and becoming.