Understanding sustainability in school arts provision: stakeholder perspectives in Australian primary schools

ABSTRACT

Although the notion of sustainability is popular in rhetoric associated with arts programmes in Australian schools, shared meanings are lacking. References to sustainability may be rooted in any combination of pragmatic, economic and/or health bases. We chose to investigate what stakeholders involved in the provision of school-based arts practices understood about the notion of sustainability in the specific context of those programmes. To do this we interviewed a range of school professionals and asked them to explain how sustainability related to arts programmes in their schools. In this article we present the particular elements that stakeholders described as being sustainable. Five categories emerged through inductive analysis that included: benefits for students, benefits for the schools, the arts programmes themselves, physical artefacts, and the capacity for schools to provide arts experiences. Notable were descriptions of sustainability from several schools that saw ongoing programmes as less important than brief arts experiences that students could carry into other areas of their life. Results illustrate the diversity of understandings about what should be sustained from arts engagement for 27 professionals in Australian Catholic Primary Schools. An ‘exposure’ model of arts programmes is articulated that captures the sustainable benefits beyond sustained involvement in and provision of arts programmes in primary schools.

KEYWORDS:

• School music programmes
• school arts programmes
• sustainability
• student benefits
• exposure model
• external providers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Professor Katrina Skewes McFerran is Head of Music Therapy and Co-Director of the National Music Therapy Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. She has researched and published about the value of music with young people in a range of contexts over the past two decades, and her latest book is ‘Creating Music Cultures in Schools: A perspective from Community Music Therapy’(Barcelona Publishers, 2014) provides a rationale for transcending current music practices in schools to include wellbeing and community building agendas. McFerran is also editor of the Open Access journal Voices: A world forum for music therapy.

Dr Alexander Hew Dale Crooke holds a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne (UniMelb), where he is investigating issues such as wellbeing, cultural responsiveness, and sustainability in the context of school-based arts projects. He has completed a PhD at UniMelb in the fields of music therapy and social policy, and also has an academic background in social and political sciences. He has undertaken research on projects spanning the fields of music therapy, social science, psychology, social services, epidemiology, and policy development. With publications in several areas, his current focus is on the benefits and challenges of school-based arts programs, specialising in psychosocial wellbeing, cultural diversity, research methodology, and education policy. He also works as a consultant, helping schools and community organisations to implement and evaluate arts programs.

John Hattie is Laureate professor at the University of Melbourne, Chair of the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leaders, and co-director of the Science of Learning Research Centre.

ORCID

Katrina Skewes McFerran http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0699-3683

Alexander Hew Dale Crooke http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5084-2642

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number LP150100697].