Abstract:

This is a qualitative case study of student teachers’ and children’s’ integrative arts educational project in the Ateneum Art Museum called “Musical Surface”. The article introduces the collaborative design learning process of students and focuses on the ideas of using new technology in arts education.

The purpose of this study is to introduce and describe the design process of the student teachers (N=12) during their collaborative arts study project with pre-school and comprehensive school pupils in the Ateneum Art Museum environment. The project theme was music by Sibelius and works of art connected to him.

The research problems were to discover through the student teachers’ experiences how their design learning process developed. The research followed the tradition that assumes that phenomena are meaningfully experienced and can be represented in personal writings and narratives. The data consisted of participative observation and the writings of a closed Facebook project group. The research methods used included qualitative content analysis of students’ reflective and evaluative writings about the creative design learning process and descriptions of video documented observations of the arts pedagogical sessions. Ethical rules of research were followed.

The main findings of this project show that collaborative, design-based learning fits very well into integrated arts educational studies of teacher education, especially in co-operation with an art museum, as does the use of modern technological applications. The development of mobile devices and applications has been rapid and global and has offered new possibilities in arts education. Innovative approaches under the artistic use of Augmented Reality technology can be developed. The development of new technology opens new possibilities and activities for creating and integrating arts in education.

The results show that student teachers learn more deeply in the participative learning process about arts education. They learned innovative ways to integrate new technology into integrative arts pedagogy.

Keywords:

Integrated music and arts pedagogy, iPads, augmented reality, teacher education (generalists), Art museum as learning environment, design learning.