An Analysis of Art Activities for Arts Convergence Education: Focused on the Age 5 Nuri-Curriculum Teacher's Guidebooks

An Analysis of Art Activities for Arts Convergence Education: Focused on the Age 5 Nuri-Curriculum Teacher's Guidebooks

The purpose of this study was to analyse the art activities in the eleven Nuri-Curriculum Teacher's Guidebooks for five-year-olds, examining their goals, their related factors in the Age 5 Nuri-Curriculum, and the type, area, method and extension of the 394 art activities they contain. The activities appeared most frequently in the life-based themes “My Town,” “Kindergarten and Friends,” “Our Nation,” “Animals, Plants and Nature” and “Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter”; among the content categories of the art-experience area, “Expressing Artistically” showed by far the highest incidence; and the 394 activities, containing 960 Nuri-Curriculum-related factors, drew chiefly on “Art Experience,” “Explore Nature,” “Social Relationship” and “Communication.” The results suggest that arts convergence education can be practised across the themes, activity types and education areas of the Nuri-Curriculum.

Arts convergence education is for children's lives as the main characters of the future generation. Experiencing arts convergence activities helps children develop into creative individuals capable of integrated thinking and appreciation for the arts, and because education is for human beings — and early childhood education above all is for children — it must be practised upon the whole of children's lives. Art gives happiness and joy to children, and music and art touch their hearts softly; such emotions help children look at our world beautifully and positively, and this positive tendency helps them extend their power to solve problems and take a new sight toward questions, matters and phenomena. It is therefore necessary to practise arts convergence education in the field of early childhood education.

What, then, is arts convergence education? It can be described as integrated education centred on arts subjects such as music, art and drama, together with other subjects such as science, mathematics and social studies. So far, however, most convergent educational programs, such as STEAM, were developed with a focus only on science, mathematics, technology and engineering, and the arts were unfortunately taken lightly as a simple tool to support the STEM areas. The field of early childhood education therefore requires understanding and insight regarding art-education activities such as music, dance, art, drama and integrated activity; to understand and practise arts convergence education, it is necessary to analyse the art activities in the Nuri-Curriculum.