Generating Cultural Capital? Impacts of artists-in-residence on teacher professional learning

In 2008, the Australian Government established the Artist-in-Residence (AiR) program as a four-year $5.2m initiative to improve young people’s access to quality arts education. Managed by State and Territory Government Education and Arts Departments, the program funded professional artists-in-residence in schools, early childhood centres and universities for a minimum of one month. One of the core principles of the program, which made it distinct from other programs for arts in schools in Australia, was that artists and educators were to work in collaborative partnership in the AiR projects to support teacher professional learning. Context-based and collaborative professional learning strategies have been identified as offering the possibility for ‘immersive’ experiences and exemplars that can be applied later in teachers’ own classrooms (Burridge & Carpenter, 2013). It was anticipated that partnering with artists would benefit teachers of all levels of experience and proficiency in teaching about the arts and through the arts, including those teachers with no arts experience at all. The AiR program was implemented at a time of significant reform in Australian education, including the development of the country’s first national curriculum, and the renewal of a creativity agenda for Australian schools. Evidence of such an agenda is found in discourse about twenty-first century learning (Marsh 2010; O’Toole, 2012b Robinson, 1999; Thomson, Jones & Hall, 2009) and the inclusion of critical and creative thinking as one of seven core competencies to be implemented across all subject areas of the new curriculum