What do art educators need to know to teach elementary generalists well? Our collaborative autoethnographic inquiry

Our collaborative autoethnographic (CAE) inquiry explores what art educators need to know to teach elementary generalists well. We analysed how authors in the United States perceive the challenges and remedies for teaching generalist art methods courses and how our lived experiences support or complicate normalized assumptions about teaching art methods for general educators. We found that authors identify familiar teaching challenges (e.g. students’ misinformed beliefs about art, limited content knowledge and fear about art-making) and suggest curricular, pedagogical and philosophical remedies. However, our lived experiences revealed that many challenges consist of structural, administrative and policy-related issues beyond individual instructors’ control. Our CAE reveals what a literature review alone could not, exposing how structural and cultural dynamics profoundly shape this work. Our findings suggest that problems extend beyond our classrooms and stem from institutional and broader cultural environments that position art as supplementary rather than essential to schooling.