Methods of Teaching Art in Elementary Schools and its Accreditation

This study intended to develop and validate the methods for teaching art in elementary schools. The first part is a qualitative phenomenological study focusing on the experiences of art teachers and students. Participants in the first part involved 12 art teachers and 15 elementary school students living in Fars province, selected through homogeneous sampling. One-to-one semistructured interviews with art teachers and elementary students were used for the purpose of data collection. In order to analyze the interview data, Colaizzi seven-step method was used. In the first part, the findings were validated through examining the interviewees, and content analysis method was used in the second part. The content analysis focused on all texts and articles that dealt with the methods of teaching art to elementary school students. Reality reconstruction was used to validate qualitative data. For this purpose, the interviews conducted by the interviewees were read and finally approved by deleting, adding or subtracting. The findings showed the following 7 criteria for teaching art: teaching method criterion (including group and individual dimensions), student criterion (including knowledge, attitude, skill, intelligence and thinking), teacher criterion (including teaching method and scientific development), opportunity criterion (including culture, heritage, art and art within social context), weakness criterion (including parents, education, time, equipment and books) strength criterion(including upstream documents and the status of art) and finally the criterion of principles (including the principle of moderation, the principle of creation, the combination of art with the objective and principle of freedom).