The Teacher as Researcher: Developing the Skills with Pre-Service Art Specialist Students

Abstract

This paper details a project which involved a group of art specialist Diploma in Education students, two lecturing staff plus a group of primary school children in a series of planned art activities for two terms. The Saturday Morning Art programme (S.M.ART) was developed to enable the students to systematically focus on art learning in these classes by using largely qualitative research processes within a case study framework. By introducing these pre-service trainee art teachers to research techniques which they can then use, we believe we are preparing them to be self-evaluative and reflective practitioners in the classroom.Descriptors: Teacher researcher, case studies, qualitative research, classroom based research, school based research.