The (Im)possibility of Primary Arts Teacher Education

UNESCO strategies, including the 2006 Road Map for Arts Education, the 2010 Seoul Agenda for Arts Education and the 2024 Framework for Culture and Arts Education, highlight a persistent concern regarding the insufficient emphasis on arts education competencies among pre-service teachers and the challenge of allocating adequate curriculum time in education programmes. In Australia, recent government policies have included the arts as a school curriculum learning area with five subjects: Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts. This curriculum aims to ensure that all young Australians experience a comprehensive arts education by providing a framework for teachers to implement sequential learning across the primary school years. Despite these efforts, Australian research tracking the implementation of the arts curriculum within schools and teacher education programmes remains limited, revealing a problematic gap. The present paper examines how an Australian university has attempted to address this gap by providing pre-service teachers with an “Arts Specialism” within a teacher education programme. Using education policy sociology theory, the study explores the contexts of influence, curriculum text production and policy implementation. Critical discourse analysis is used to identify negotiations between influential Australian stakeholders, including university programme leaders who have supported the concept of an arts curriculum specialism. The study addresses themes of arts education content and pedagogy, revealing challenges and opportunities in implementing this specialism and concluding with recommendations for future developments.