Speakers
Description
UNESCO has a vision of transformative education based on building learners’ capacities and motivating them to create a more peaceful and sustainable world. The arts offer tremendous potential for enlivening and propelling learning that transforms. This paper reports survey research that examined teachers’ perspectives on the potential of particular aspects of arts learning for supporting transformative education. We analyzed 606 arts teacher responses from 39 countries. We compiled teacher ratings of the significance to students’ learning and development of particular learning actions, contextual factors, relevance factors, and outcomes (within and across predominant art forms taught). The arts learning actions rated as most meaningful to students’ development included “communicating/story-telling,” “appreciating artworks,” and “creating.” The top-rated contextual factor was “trusting relationships with teachers and peers.” The top-rated relevance factor was “arts activity supports well-being & mental health.” Teachers rated the development of “imagination & creative skills” as the most meaningful learning outcome.
CV
Benjamin Bolden, Tiina Kukkonen, Nathan Rickey
Benjamin Bolden, music educator and composer, is the UNESCO Chair in Arts and Learning and an associate professor at Queen’s University, Canada. His research interests include arts education, music education, the learning and teaching of composing, creativity, arts-based research, assessment in the arts, teacher education, teacher knowledge, and teachers’ professional learning. As a teacher, Ben has worked with pre-school, elementary, secondary, and university students in Canada, England, and Taiwan. Ben is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.
Tiina Kukkonen is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Education in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, Canada. She has contributed research in the areas of early childhood development through art, artist-school partnerships, and rural arts education. She also has a keen interest in arts-based approaches to research and knowledge translation. The driving force behind her work is the desire to make visual arts education accessible, relevant, and inspiring for all. To that end, she explores playful, artful, and practical approaches to teaching and research.
Nathan Rickey is a musician and PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Canada. His research focuses on how educators can leverage classroom assessment to enhance students’ learning. Drawing on self-regulated learning theories and learning analytics, he examines the cognitive and affective mechanisms of students engaged in self-assessment to support teachers in fostering lifelong learners. His research is informed by his work as a high school English teacher wherein he observed self-assessment's central role in empowering agentic learners. Nathan’s work has been published in top education journals, such as the Journal of Educational Research.
