Enacting the signature pedagogies of arts education in the online learning environment for primary teacher education

In Australia, where initial teacher education is offered both on-campus and in a fully online mode, future primary-school generalist teachers study teaching across the school curriculum. This includes the arts curriculum where opportunities for future teachers to engage in authentic arts learning themselves are generally seen as essential for developing their arts teaching capabilities. However, a number of university educators have reservations about being able to do this effectively in the online environment because of the practical, experiential, and performative nature of arts learning. This study reviews the learning design of two compulsory arts education units in a fully online Bachelor of Education (Primary). It uses the "signature pedagogies" conceptualisation of the distinctive, durable, and pervasive pedagogical features of a discipline and explores whether arts education's signature pedagogies can be sustained in the online environment. Using qualitative content analysis methodology, the study shows that the learning design preserves arts education's signature pedagogies in the online context, though the expression of these is re-imagined for this learning environment. Augmented by survey data from students' unit evaluations, the study shows that online teacher education can offer meaningful arts learning in units designed for future primary-school teachers.