Strengthening Arts Education through Partnerships with Expert Arts Practitioners: A Literature Review

The Arts, covering well-known discipline areas, offer multiple benefits. Teaching these discipline areas, such as music, dance, and drama, can also have several multiple benefits. In visual and media arts, which are included in the Australian national curriculum, teachers are expected to obtain the required knowledge and skills, including confidence to teach subject matter. A literature review was conducted to explore the best approaches for providing necessary knowledge and skills to pre-service teachers undertaking teacher education programs, and in-service teachers engaged in professional learning and development. The study mainly focuses on the engagement of expert art practitioners in this process. For this purpose, a comprehensive review of the literature was guided by two research questions: (1) What does the pertinent literature tell us about how expert arts practitioners support and enhance arts education? and (2) How might partnerships that involve expert arts practitioners help to strengthen and sustain professional learning/education for pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and other stakeholders? In this paper, the findings of the literature review are summarized and presented thematically. They reveal that, at present, partnership models may offer an approach to enhance and sustain arts education. The study presents evidence that such partnerships can play a role in providing professional learning and education for pre-service and in-service teachers. However, the literature also suggests that current approaches to these partnership models remain insufficient to address the scale of the systemic intervention required to address current gaps in arts education, particularly concerning in-service professional development in arts education for Australian generalist educators and pre-service teacher training in arts education. Therefore, we propose that stakeholders consider engaging more expert practitioners through partnerships to provide practical arts education experiences and the need for such long-term collaborative initiatives.