Promoting occupational capacity of pre-service teachers: Design integrated into arts teacher education

Teaching visual arts requires a distinctive blend of disciplinary mastery and instructional acumen, yet empirical research on how teacher education programs cultivate this dual capacity remains scarce. While the tripartite framework of content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge has guided decades of inquiry in an array of disciplines, its application to arts teacher training is notably underdeveloped. This study examined whether a semester-long supplementary artistic design course could strengthen pre-service visual arts teachers’ professional knowledge across these three domains. The course treated design tasks as pedagogical cases through which student-teachers rehearsed explanation, misconception diagnosis, lesson sequencing, and feedback routines. A quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test control-group design was implemented with 94 undergraduate student-teachers at a public university, who were randomly allocated to treatment or comparison conditions. Domain-specific instruments assessed the knowledge dimensions before and following the intervention. Results indicated that disciplinary knowledge gains did not differ between groups, while pedagogical content knowledge showed small but robust improvements favoring the intervention group; pedagogical knowledge gains appeared promising but proved statistically fragile under sensitivity analysis. This investigation represents the first controlled evaluation of targeted coursework effects on professional knowledge in arts teacher education, extending a research tradition previously concentrated in quantitative teaching fields. The findings likely suggest that systematically embedding teaching-focused cycles into studio work can selectively sharpen pre-service art educators’ capacity to transform design expertise into teachable forms, even without substantial expansion of disciplinary content.