Arts education in Hong Kong kindergartens: provision of activities and impact of teachers’ demographics

Abstract

Arts and Creativity is one learning area of Hong Kong’s official kindergarten curriculum framework. Kindergarten teachers are expected to foster children’s creativity via four art forms: music, visual arts, dance, and drama. However, prior studies have investigated the provision of activities for each of the art forms in isolation and have not explored the demographic variables that predict teachers’ provision of arts education activities. Investigating the provision of the four art forms and its relationship with teachers’ demographics could provide an overview of the status of arts education in Hong Kong kindergartens. We had two research goals: (1) investigate the frequency with which kindergarten teachers conduct arts education activities focusing on music, visual arts, dance, and drama; (2) identify subgroups of teachers who differ regarding the provision of arts education activities and analyze how key demographic variables predict their memberships to these subgroups. We surveyed 477 teachers. Descriptive statistics, latent profile analysis, and multinomial logistic regression analysis were performed. We found that the presence of the four art forms was unbalanced. Participants reported conducting music and visual arts activities frequently, while dance and drama activities were occasionally or rarely conducted. Moreover, we identified three subgroups of teachers who provided arts education activities with different frequencies. Participants with a master’s degree and those who worked in government-funded kindergartens were more likely to be in the highest arts provision group. Findings suggest that the curriculum is not being implemented accurately, as teachers do not equally expose children to the four art forms. We interpret these findings as a reflection of teachers’ uneven preparation in the various art forms. Implications for educational policy regarding professional development are discussed.

Keywords:

• Early childhood education
• arts education provisions
• classroom practices
• survey
• curriculum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Please visit: https://www.edb.gov.hk/en/edu-system/preprimary-kindergarten/quality-assurance-framework/qr/qr-re-port/index.html.

2 When comparing models, if the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) are smaller and the entropy is higher, the better the model fit is. As can be seen, the 5-profile model has the lowest AIC and BIC and the highest entropy. However, the proportion for the most minor class was only 0.004, which is considered not large enough.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the project “Arts and Creativity in Hong Kong Kindergartens: Towards Glocal Pedagogies” (grant #04592) and funded by the Department of Early Childhood Education at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) and the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) under the University Grants Committee. The views expressed herein are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent the views of their institution.