Exploring Preschool Teachers’ Attitudes and Beliefs towards Teaching Visual Arts 学前教师对视觉艺术教学的态度和信念之初探

Abstract

Visual Arts is recognised as an important sub-strand in the National Preschool Standard Curriculum that provide children the opportunities to enhance their interest, and artistic growth and development. However, visual arts is always gets a little attention as 
children are commonly engaged on academic content of the curriculum like reading, writing and arithmetic. This study aims to explore preschool teachers’ attitudes and beliefs towards teaching visual arts. This study is a qualitative research involving eight preschool teachers. They are from Malaysia three different states -Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, and Sabah. The research design uses structured interview method of collecting data and this structured interview was carefully planned and conducted formally, where the researcher interviews the respondents, from a list of specific questions that are drawn up, to address the main aspects of the research. The data collected provides possible areas of improvement for preschool curriculum offer to young children. These findings support previous research, which show positive effects on attitudes and beliefs towards teaching visual arts to young children when support and encouragement is provided to preschool teachers. Furthermore, the study result found that preschool teachers were not well trained and varied in their implementation of visual arts teaching in preschools. More structured visual arts training was recommended to prepare preschool teachers for effective teaching in the subject area. 

视觉艺术被视为国家学前教育标准课程中的重要领域，它为增强孩子们的兴趣以及艺术成长和发展，提供了学习机会。一般来说，孩子们的学习偏重于学术课程，例如阅读、写作和算术，而忽视了视觉艺术的培养。这项研究旨在探索学前老师对视觉艺术教学的态度和信念。它是一项定性研究，涉及八名学前班教师。他们来自马来西亚雪兰莪州、吉隆坡和沙巴。研究设计使用结构化访谈方式搜集数据，并且这种结构化访谈是经过精心策划及以正规方式进行的，其中研究员从提出的一系列具体问题中采访受访者，以达致研究的主要目标。所搜集的数据是为了提升学前教育课程领域之素质。这项研究延伸了之前所进行的视觉艺术教学研究，研究结果再次证明，若学龄前老师得到支持与正面鼓励，这对他们看待幼儿教育的态度和信念将会产生积极的影响。此外，研究结果还发现，学前教师在学前班视觉艺术教学中如果获得到良好的培训，将会使这领域获得更佳效果。