Creative Arts Learning Online: The Development Early Childhood Preservice Teacher Skill, Confidence, and Connectedness During COVID-19 (and Beyond)

This paper discusses a small project that explored preservice teachers’ experience of completing a creative arts unit online, because of the lockdown restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Preservice teachers and teacher educators were required to change their usual practice and adjust to deliver teaching and learning within the online space. For creative arts teaching and learning, this task was especially challenging, since teaching the arts relies heavily on practical, embodied, and experiential learning experiences. These pedagogical characteristics are difficult to replicate online, especially at short notice. For preservice teachers the issue is further complicated by having limited prior experience, and limited tertiary experience in the Creative Arts, and, consequently, limited associated skill and confidence. The paper discusses preservice teacher’s self-ratings of skill and confidence before and after completing a single Creative Arts unit. It also considers the importance of their sense of connectedness and wellbeing as experienced in this unit during the pandemic and poses the question about the most effective approach/es to early childhood ITE creative arts pedagogy.