Abstract
ABSTRACT The intersection of arts education and special education as a field has been described as lacking in unity, partly because the practices of its different stakeholders are embedded in either special education or arts education. This paper investigates how principals prioritise teachers’ qualifications when organising arts education in compulsory school for pupils with intellectual disabilities (CSID) in Sweden, what they perceive the value of arts education in CSID to be and how they organise arts education in relation to cooperation between pupils from CSID and compulsory regular school (CRS). These questions were investigated using a questionnaire, which was answered by 124 principals. The results show that around three times as many principals prioritised specialised arts knowledge over competence in special education. However, the degree to which this occurred varied across arts subjects. A majority of the principals valued arts education for the opportunities it offers pupils to develop generic abilities, such as communication skills, creativity, and imagination. Cooperation between CSID and CRS for arts education appeared to depend on how school leadership was organised. The article concludes with suggestions on how the organisation of arts education could be improved in relation to the two areas of expertise and the idea of inclusion.
Highlights
Arts education is considered important for the development of cognitive abilities necessary for creating meaning in the world (Eisner 2002)
The intersection of arts education and special education as a field has been described as lacking in unity, partly because the practices of its different stakeholders are embedded in either special education or arts education
This paper investigates how principals prioritise teachers’ qualifications when organising arts education in compulsory school for pupils with intellectual disabilities (CSID) in Sweden, what they perceive the value of arts education in CSID to be and how they organise arts education in relation to cooperation between pupils from CSID and compulsory regular school (CRS)
Summary
Arts education is considered important for the development of cognitive abilities necessary for creating meaning in the world (Eisner 2002). This is one of the reasons why arts education is seen as a significant part of schooling for pupils in need of special educational support. It has been argued that the intersection of arts education and special education as a field is lacking in unity, partly because the practices of its different stakeholders are embedded in either special education or arts education (Malley and Silverstein 2014). Research on arts education for pupils with disabilities is sparse (Crockett, Berry, and Anderson 2015; Crockett and Blakeslee 2018; Malley and Silverstein 2014). As Horowitz (2018) argues, there is a need for more foundational and basic research in this field
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