No abstract

Due to the rapid development and advancement within various fields, the scope of knowledge is expanding at a staggering pace. In modern education, experts and teachers makes efforts to eliminate fragmentation of the school curriculum and to modernize the manner of teaching thus optimizing the learning process. In planning art lessons, teachers must adopt an appropriate teaching strategy that enables students to acquire knowledge efficiently and holistically, encouraging the creative solving of art tasks. The present article presents some conclusions of experimental research undertaken to determine the effects of the implementation of a teaching process involving cross-curricular integration. The study involved 274 fifth-grade students and 14 single-class teachers from seven selected Slovenian primary schools. It was found that teachers achieved better learning outcomes by using teaching strategies with cross-curricular integration in sculpting tasks as part of the learning process in art education. The proposed guidelines for teaching art concepts will help teachers to overcome specific obstacles in planning activities for the visual arts learning process, while students will benefit from an increased connection between subjects and integrated knowledge of the visual arts.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire process of teaching and learning moved online. This forced teachers and pupils to heavily rely on information and communications technology (ICT) and make adjustments to the new mode of teaching and learning in educational institutions. We conducted a qualitative case study by interviewing 24 teachers from Slovene primary schools focusing on the implementation of cross-curricular connections in music and visual arts content with the support of ICT during the period of emergency remote teaching. We found that when planning and implementing the cross-curricular learning process, teachers insufficiently took advantage of possibilities offered by modern ICT. The manner of implementing cross-curricular connections showed uncertainties in terms of understanding their specifics, resulting in the inefficient transfer of concepts taught, the results of which were seen in pupils’ work. This might additionally show the negative influence of parental supervision on the creative thinking and expression of pupils. The present study emphasizes the lack of ICT competences on the part of all participants in the educational process. Our findings show the need to educate teachers by eliminating the uncertainties related to the implementation of distant cross-curricular connections while meaningfully applying ICT adapted to pupils’ competences.

In the delivery of music, visual arts and social sciences content, educational strategies are constantly changing and improving, which was especially evident during the COVID-19 epidemic. Students in higher education faced new challenges in these areas, too. In the qualitative study, 129 students of Primary School Teaching and Preschool Teaching study programs at the Faculty of Education of University of Primorska completed the online questionnaire. For the purposes of this paper, we analyzed their answers to three open-ended questions in order to find out their opinions on studying arts and social sciences at a distance. We found out that the participants faced different challenges in the implementation of the distance learning process, mainly due to different conditions for the implementation of distance learning obligations and different ICT competencies of all involved in the study process. The conducted research will help to improve the study process in case it goes online again.

In the interdisciplinary learning process of visual art, the teachers must provide for the students effective gaining of integrated knowledge such that will encourage them to solve the art tasks creatively. This chapter presents partial results obtained on the basis of an experimental study by means of which the authors wished to determine the effects of visual art learning process conducted in an interdisciplinary manner. The findings of the qualitative analysis of sculpting works showed more creative art solutions by the students from experimental group, which additionally enforced the results of quantitative part of the experimental research carried out. This means that the guidelines concerning the manner of teaching visual art concepts will eliminate ambiguities in the planning of interdisciplinary teaching process applied in visual art education, and will provide the students with more efficient acquisition of integrated knowledge and creative solving of art tasks.