Developing preservice primary teachers' confidence and competence in arts education using principles of authentic learning

Arts education research over the years has highlighted the situation of nonspecialist preservice primary arts teachers as having little confidence in their own artistic ability and their ability to teach the arts to children. Added to this, problems such a lack of resources, confidence, priority, time, knowledge and experience appear to inhibit the regular teaching of the arts by generalist classroom teachers while at the same time, face-to-face hours for preservice primary arts education have decreased significantly over the recent years. This paper describes how one subject within a Primary Teacher Education course responded to these challenges. This subject was based on Herrington, Oliver and Reeves' (2003) framework for creating authentic learning environments then triangulates this authentic learning framework with what students wanted to learn in the subject and how they perceived they had developed their confidence and competence in creative arts education.