Desarrollo de un Cuadro de Mando Integral con un mínimo de 10 índices de

The teacher interviews revealed that the teaching culture at Fairview would not support an EfS program grounded in the Visual Arts. I was able to identify a number of barriers for Visual Arts-led EfS at Fairview. Although the teachers experienced institutional barriers, including time issues associated with a crowded curriculum, their biggest barrier was the teachers themselves. Factors such as teacher-directed lessons, a superficial understanding of the value of Visual Arts in EfS and the lack of interest towards collaboration are personal barriers that affected the implementation of an integrated approach to EfS.

At Fairview, the classroom teacher considered that Visual Arts offered students relief from the ‘real’ learning that occurs in classrooms. I agree with the classroom teacher that Visual Arts should be enjoyable; however, this research reveals that Visual Arts is not a superficial ‘soft’ subject and that handling discarded materials, such as REmida materials, facilitated shifts in sustainable awareness and attitudes. The findings show that an open- ended, process-led approach to artmaking encouraged the students to reflect on their environmental footprint. Further, some students were making self-initiated behavioural changes. Teacher-directed instruction is an effective approach to teaching skills and

techniques; however, it is not appropriate in all situations, particularly when Visual Arts is an agent for social reconstruction (Efland, 1990). At Fairview, the art teacher was inclined to base her program on the Mimetic-Behavioural Model. She justified her explicit teaching style as a means to instil confidence in the students and to prepare them for high school. Even though Efland (1990) identified four teaching models (see Table 3) of Visual Arts education, linking aesthetics, pedagogical theories and ideology, the students were used to an explicit teaching style. At Fairview, Visual Arts was regarded as a stand-alone subject and there was no evidence to suggest any integration in the Year 7 class. A likely explanation for this could be that Visual Arts was considered a ‘specialist’ subject; therefore, the classroom teacher did not

138 feel the need to plan for this subject, leaving her more time to prepare and devote to other subjects.

An important theme that emerged from the teacher interviews was a perceived lack of time. The classroom teacher had to cope with a crowded curriculum and was expected to participate in school-wide initiatives and programs. The classroom teacher’s strategy was to program in “chunks” of time where she would timetable afternoon sessions for projects in order to “nail” a project over consecutive days, over a two- to three-week period. The teacher gave two reasons for this strategy. The first was to “just to get it out of the way.” The second was to maintain continuity. Alternatively, working as a specialist teacher had its own

challenges. The two specialist teachers’ major hurdle was delivering their programs in one- hour blocks. They felt they did not have sufficient time; consequently, it affected the delivery of their programs. The S&E teacher identified a lack of continuity as a key factor that made it difficult to maintain a level of interest in her programs. An added challenge the art teacher faced was to factor in time for cleaning up after her lessons. She claimed it limited the amount of talking in her lessons. The implication of having limited opportunities to talk during a hectic Visual Arts lesson means there are probably even less, if any, opportunities for reflection. Therefore, the challenge for implementing visual methodologies in the primary school setting is making time for practice-led research.

Nimkulrat (2009) noted that a limitation of practice-led research, which complements the Pragmatic Social-Reconstruction approach to Visual Arts education, is that it is time- consuming. Time is necessary to develop a dialogue with materials, and to understand their physical and metaphoric properties. Students cannot develop the quality of dialogue that is promoted through REmida’s philosophy of creative reuse (Eskesen, 2006/07; Gandini & Kaminsky, 2005; Giacopini & Ferrari, 2005; Pettersen, 2007), the Reggio Approach (Dewey, 1934; Vecchi, 2010; Vecchi & Giudici, 2004) and new materialism (Barrett & Bolt, 2013; P. Carter, 2004) when the finished product becomes the measure of achievement. Fairview’s culture of explicit teaching was incongruent with the exploration and experimentation that comes with Materials-led Inquiry. The students were expected to ‘get it right’ the first time, without being given time to work out what ‘right’ meant to them. The classroom teacher privileged the plan over the materials. In this particular context, when the Visual Arts are the vehicle in which EfS is being taught, I disagree with the classroom teacher’s approach of planning before handling the materials, especially when the objective of EfS is to build the students’ capacity for transformational change (ARIES, 2004-2012) and artmaking can be a method to initiate attitudinal and behavioural shifts. In this situation, I suggest that it may be more beneficial if students are allowed to handle unfamiliar materials, so that they can identify

139 and take into account the potential and limitation of materials they choose to use, before any planning takes place.

The situation at Fairview mirrored the research (Prabawa-Sear & Baudains, 2011), where students were exposed to lessons based solely on knowledge acquisition and learning about climate change through one subject area. In the Fairview context, the students learned about climate change during S&E. The limitations faced by the S&E teacher were that she was working in isolation and teaching in one-hour blocks, which made it pragmatic to focus on teaching content and skills. Likewise, the classroom teacher was experiencing her own time constraints; therefore, she preferred to work autonomously as a way of coping with a crowded curriculum. Teaching content was the classroom teacher’s priority and she did not

accommodate time for student reflection in her timetable. However, with support from the classroom teacher, the S&E and the Visual Arts programs could have been the basis for an integrated approach to Sustainability. For example, if the classroom teacher was open to collaborating with the specialist teachers, the art teacher’s role could be adapted to reflect the way that an atelierista supports educators in the Reggio setting. In the Reggio setting, the atelier, atelierista and the entire school are interconnected. The atelierista’s role is to bridge teaching and learning through the creative process and visual modalities. The atelierista collaborates with the classroom teacher to co-construct learning experiences for the students and works alongside students to co-construct meaning and to learn through visual languages (Parnell, 2005).

I acknowledge that the Reggio Approach is an early childhood approach to education that leans heavily towards social constructivism. However, Hesterman (2011) has identified an independent school in Perth, WA, where those educational principles are taught through to Year 10. Further, Reggio principles only guide REmida; they do not bind REmida.

Sustainability through creativity is what underpins this organisation’s philosophy. REmida is an extension of the atelier model, a space that invites visual methodologies into the classroom where the atelierista’s role is to provoke learning through artmaking. There is no reason why such an approach cannot work in a WA government primary school, considering the Australian Curriculum expects Sustainability to be integrated into the curriculum wherever possible (ACARA, 2013a). When an individual teacher’s passion drives EfS, rather than a whole school’s commitment, behavioural change is less likely to occur (2011). It is more likely that the barriers are in the classroom, including the barriers of teacher and parental views on sustainability, rather than in administration or through the curriculum (Lewis et al., 2009; Prabawa-Sear & Baudains, 2011; Salter et al., 2011).

140 For example, in the context of this research, the Pragmatic Social-Reconstruction Model (Efland, 1990) was the most appropriate model to apply considering that the aim of EfS is to do more than just inform students about the environment but to bring about change on a personal level and through social reconstruction (ARIES, 2004-2012; Tilbury, 2011). Visual Arts can become part of a teacher’s repertoire to embed Sustainability across the curriculum, where Visual Arts can add an extra layer to knowledge acquisition through material thinking (Dewey, 1934; Barrett & Bolt, 2013; P. Carter, 2004). The Pragmatic Social-Reconstruction Model can empower students to adopt Australian values outlined in the Melbourne

Declaration (2008), ARIES (2004-2012) and the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2013b), and to fulfil environmental goals espoused for the DESD (Tilbury, 2011) and beyond its conclusion in 2014.