Sociological underpinnings in pre-service elementary teachers' attitudes towards artworks

While recent approaches for art teaching give substantial emphasis on learners, art lessons are still largely framed by teachers as they are responsible for the opportunities offered for creating art and responding to artworks. Therefore, issues surrounding the way elementary teachers develop their knowledge and attitudes towards art and education inform to a great extend the content of art education at elementary level.

This study focuses on what lies behind pre-service school teachers’ attitudes towards artworks and the sociological implications of their choices of artworks on the expected social knowledge that results from them. In particular, it investigates a) the kind of artworks that they are more likely to use in their art-teaching, b) ways to challenge their assumptions and develop their professional adequacy for approaching artworks with children, and c) their beliefs about the role that artworks may have for cultivating social knowledge. A mixed method approach is adopted. The study was carried out in Cyprus and the sample consisted of 91 pre-service elementary school teachers.  

The findings suggest that the participants were inexperienced viewers of artworks. When their assumptions about art were challenged through a formalistic approach for understanding artworks, their confidence in understanding artworks and planning art-viewing activities was boosted. However, the participants appeared to have a limited understanding of what art is and reflected a narrow range of ideas and values about art with little or no relevance to the sociological context within which they are produced. In particular, they mostly chose 19^th century European male artists’ artworks based on the ideas of beauty, realism, skills and expression of feelings and ideas. Implications of this study are discussed within the context of teachers’ training programs and ways to enrich participants’ professional adequacy to use artworks to address cultural and social issues both locally and globally.