Abstract:

Art has been a compulsory curricular component in Basic Education in Brazil since 1996. The art teacher training courses were regulated in 1978. Despite the training courses being regulated for 33 years, Brazil hasn't got enough art teachers to meet the demand in all Basic Education schools. In view of Brazil's teacher shortage and continental dimensions e-learning training is a great opportunity to meet a demand that is suppressed of teachers in the whole country. For that reason Santos Metropolitan University, Unimes Virtual has been offering the Art Teacher E-Learning Training course since 2007. The starting point for the art teacher training course is an academic culture that would overcome the dichotomy between theory and practice, hence the course opting for the Triangular Approach to Teaching Art from afar. This epistemological approach comprises three actions, “to do”, “to read” and “to contextualize” the artistic production. The course requires students to do, read and contextualize images. Teachers working in this course had the first challenge as to how to keep up with the student's artistic production at a distance and find out what resources are offered by the Learning Management Systems Moodle (LMS) to monitor student's artistic productions from afar. The practice in "art studio" is the method universally recognized as the most effective way to learn art skills. This method is the most efficient to get to know artistic materials and tools. In the "art studio” the "trainee" can observe the "master". We note that the communication resource in the LMS Moodle enables artistic proposition as well as visualization and evaluation of the process/product at a distance. We use the video resource to emphasize the practice in “art studios” without the physical presence of the trainee. The student is able to watch on video how the teacher prepares the materials and tools. The videos are available throughout the course in the virtual learning environment. The students can access the video whenever they need to observe how the teacher works with the materials and the techniques and procedures being taught. The content in text format also describes techniques and materials and includes the images that illustrate the management of materials and the exercises to improve the ability to act. We offer artistic production “to do” activities in the communication resource Forum. The Forum sets out the objectives for the activity as well as the procedure and the criteria by which the evaluation will be made. The students can do their artistic production by following the instructions. In case of doubt they can access the video at anytime to observe how the teacher works, to read the content in text format and also to ask questions and clarify any doubts with the teacher through other resources such as online chat, the forum and e-mail. The students then send their production images by the LMS Moodle resources and the teacher follows they development and evaluates their performance.

Keywords:

e-learning in Higher Education, art teacher e-learning training, triangular approach to art teacher.