Elementary Majors' Resistance to Art Method Courses: Exploring Issues of Gender, Class, and Civility

Abstract

We teach art education methods courses to elementary generalist teachers at a large Midwestern state university, where we find some students express entrenched preconceptions about the role of art in elementary curricula and demonstrate resistance to the content and instruction. Collaboratively, we sought to find why these students evidence such resistance. Concerned that this resistance might be in part due to socialization processes that devalue both art and women, we investigated our conjectures by developing survey questions about student expectations, their value of art as a school subject, whether they anticipated integrating art with other subjects in their future classrooms, what ideal content and instructors of an art methods courses should be, and how they experienced other students as supporting or hindering their learning. We performed content analysis of previous course evaluations and survey responses of 145 students and then interpreted findings and drew implications for those teaching similar courses.