Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

Early childhood education in Hong Kong faced its millennial reform and this reform called for a change in the policy and curriculum. The curriculum revamp aimed at promoting children’s creativity and life-long learning capacity. Therefore, arts become one of the genres in the integrated curriculum. Nevertheless, the practices in the local kindergartens in Hong Kong seemed to have barriers in meeting the government’s standard after the curriculum revamp due to conventional values of academic achievement from the public and parents. In theory, we expected children created their artworks by expressing their voices creatively through visual arts. In practice, children created their crafts by following teachers’ instructions. Obviously, there is a belief-and-practice gap in teaching visual arts for young children in Hong Kong. As a matter of fact, this study aims at investigating teachers’ beliefs and practices in teaching visual arts in Hong Kong. In this study, 29 teachers were interviewed individually through semi-structured interviews. Totally 409 minutes of data were collected. The interviews were transcribed, coded and analyzed by using thematic network analysis. The findings indicated a belief-and-practice gap of kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong towards visual arts in early childhood education. Teachers agreed with the notion of creativity but they found difficulties in striking the balance between creativity and artistic skills. This study reflected not only on the importance of subject knowledge in teaching visual arts to young children, but also how teacher education in visual arts in the future should be conducted.