Abstract:

Persistence is deemed to be a critical disposition for 21st century learners, graduates and educators. Those who master persistence are abler in today’s innovation-driven and ever-changing world to work through challenges and adversity, deal constructively with failure and achieve their goals and outputs from mindful and sustain effort. There is evidence that self-efficacious students participate more readily, work harder and persist longer that those with low self-efficacy. While persistence features as a critical character quality or habit of mind in numerous contemporary early years’ and life-long learning frameworks, far less attention is paid to developing, modelling and monitoring persistence in schools, universities and teacher education to combat attrition rates from education and the teaching profession.

The literature indicates that more third level students are expressing anxiety and stress trying to juggle study with travel, work and home commitments. The so-named “snowflake generation” are sometimes deemed to be less resilient and give up too easily. This is partly attributed to so-named “helicopter parenting” which over-protected them from opportunities to encounter challenges that require persistence. Yet persistence is ever-necessary to be successful across learning domains and education continua. In addition, while many and varied reasons explain current teacher attrition rates, teacher persistence – the tendency to persist steadfastly, until successful, in the many specific courses of action that constitute teaching is an acknowledged factor especially in ever-increasing complex and challenging classroom contexts. Consequently, the literature indicates that all teacher educators ought to unpack persistence more concertedly within their programmes and develop related knowledge, skills and habit of mind to help pre-service teachers persist firstly, with daily challenges and setbacks at university and in the classroom and secondly, to model and develop their learners’ persistence.

Therefore, to address this challenge, this explorative practitioner research evaluates the effectiveness of a visual arts-based initial teacher education programme component on increasing pre-service elementary teachers’ persistence. Research methods comprise of qualitative content analysis of participants’ summative written reflections and their artwork. All participants had foundational pedagogical content knowledge and the majority had modest creative self-efficacy in visual arts. Informed by Claxton’s creative habits of mind and Hetland’s studio habits participants reflected on their "habit" levels pre and post intervention and which improved as a consequence of the arts-based learning experience. Findings indicate that the programme component was especially effective in increasing persistence with respect to tolerating uncertainty, sticking with difficulty and daring to be different. Secondly, other findings highlight particular programme component affordances to which they attribute this development. Thirdly, other findings evidence how the experience impacted their appreciation of this transdisciplinary disposition. While appreciating this explorative and qualitative case study is context specific, it does provide impetus for additional research on both student and teacher persistence development in schools, universities and teacher education.

Keywords:

Persistence, Self-efficacy, Teacher Education, Visual arts, Twenty-first century dispositions.