Breaking the Mould - Creating Arts Savvy Teacher Training: How to Create Meaningful, Socially-engaged, Arts-led Teacher Training across All Disciplines (not just Arts!) View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Kate Fellows  

We want arts engaged teachers for the future, whatever their disciplines. How do we do that when many trainees are products of a literacy/numeracy focused education system with low levels of cultural capital themselves? We work annually with five partner organisations (Universities: Leeds, Leeds Beckett, Trinity, York St John; Gorse SCITT) to reach most Initial Teacher Trainees (ITT) and education students in Leeds (around 600 trainees per year), support them on their personal cultural journey and give them the skills to translate it into classroom practice. To misquote Shakespeare: ‘give me a teacher during their initial training, and they will be mine for life’. We love the diversity of the trainees and the challenge it presents us when working within the disciplines of PE, Social Sciences, Maths and Physics as well as the more usual Humanities, Biology and Art. We are using the arts to change the quality of teaching, focusing not just on subject knowledge and attainment, but also on the social value of art for creativity, wellbeing and by telling stories from different perspectives. Our research centres on the question, ‘how much object-based learning does a trainee need to make an impact in classroom practice?’ We tracked ‘sticky learning’ and found that using objects led to a 50% increase in cultural capital and confidence in using arts engagements, even in non-arts disciplines. During the workshop, we will get hands on with some of the techniques we used with trainees to boost confidence and skills, underpinned by research findings.