Enhancing Undergraduate Pre-Service Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in Arts Education: Integrating Creative Body-Based Learning and an Ethics of Care

Abstract

Arts education is fundamental in enabling young people to think and express themselves creatively and critically. The Early Years Learning Framework and Australian Curriculum (F – 10) both emphasise that all young people should experience authentic arts education. However, many pre-service teachers (PSTs) encounter barriers to visualising themselves as arts educators, while initial teacher education (ITE) programs struggle to provide the depth of learning needed to overcome these barriers. Fostering confidence in developing self-efficacy in arts education is, thus, crucial. This article explores the challenges faced by PSTs in a foundational arts education course within an undergraduate initial teacher education program and the strategies tertiary arts educators employed to redesign the course. Drawing on tertiary arts educators’ experiences, the redesign highlights a dual pedagogical approach that integrates creative body-based learning (CBL) with a reimagined ethics of care, offering readers a model for reimagining arts teacher education through embodied and relational practices that are simultaneously creative, critical, and caring.

Introduction

Arts education develops young people’s creativity and critical thinking skills, empowering them to tackle complex challenges and uncertainties facing the world (Dinham, 2023; Dinham & Chalk, 2018; Ewing, 2011). In Australia, an authentic arts curriculum, delivered by knowledgeable and confident educators, is essential for fostering future creative practices. However, many generalist primary teachers and pre-service teachers (PSTs) face barriers in teaching the arts effectively, due to a lack of confidence and formal training (Lemon & Garvis, 2013). These issues are often rooted in limited prior experience with the arts, which hinders their ability to teach the five arts subjects outlined in the Australian curriculum: Dance, Drama, Music, Media Arts, and Visual Arts (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority ACARA, 2022b). As a result, many teachers avoid teaching the arts altogether (Dinham, 2023; Lorenza, 2021) and PSTs often enter their teacher education programs with little background in the subject matter, feeling intimidated by the breadth and complexity of the curriculum (Garrett & MacGill, 2021).

This article explores the challenges faced by PSTs, course developers and lecturers in arts education, and the strategies employed in teacher education programs to build PSTs’ confidence, skills, and pedagogical knowledge. The article focuses on the Foundations in Arts Education course (EDUC 2054) within the undergraduate teacher education program and draws on the experiences of lecturers and tutors at the University of South Australia (UniSA) as they worked together to redesign the course and incorporate key elements to support self-efficacy in arts education. This course prepares PSTs to teach in early childhood and primary school settings by enhancing their arts education knowledge and pedagogical skills through a supportive and relational approach, rooted in shared arts experiences.

The Foundations in Arts Education course uses both the Australian Curriculum (version 9.0) and the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). In both these curricula, the students are positioned as artists with the understanding that we all have creative potential to express ourselves in and through the arts. In the Australian Curriculum (v9.0), the Arts are positioned as a key learning area including five connected yet distinct learning areas: Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music, and Visual Arts. Learning in the arts is developed through the experience and acquisition of an understanding of not only the skills and techniques in each arts discipline, but with critical engagement with arts worlds and practices. In the EYLF (v2.0), arts learning is woven across different outcome areas, including as a strategy to promote wellbeing and as multimodal literacies (Australian Government Department of Education [AGDE], 2022). Both curricula work from the premise that arts understanding is built through aesthetic experiences combined with study and reflection (ACARA, 2022b, Australian Government Department of Education [AGDE], 2022).

From 2023–2025, the cohorts of PSTs who enrolled in the Foundations in Arts Education course consisted of approximately 450 students across early childhood and primary education streams. Many students enter the undergraduate education course directly from secondary school, with a minority of mature-age students. International students, predominantly Chinese students, make up around 20% of the student intake for the programs. PSTs’ diverse experiences in arts education and in general learning experiences impacts their course engagement. For example, many PSTs (post COVID) have experienced online learning as the norm, reducing their confidence in social learning environments. The observed result of this has been an increased reluctance by PSTs to engage in embodied learning activities, requiring careful scaffolding to first build confidence in active social participation before fostering creative risk taking within these learning experiences.

Elements in the Redesigned Foundations in Arts Education Course

A key element of this course design is the application of an expanded ethics of care approach (MacGill, 2016), which underpins reciprocal trusting relationships between educators and students. According to this approach, education extends beyond the delivery of content; it is also about creating a community of learners where attentiveness, deep listening, and mutual respect foster a supportive learning environment (MacGill, 2016). In the context of arts education, this means understanding the diverse needs of PSTs, helping them overcome feelings of inadequacy or intimidation, and building a learning community that encourages engagement and confidence. In addition to emotional support, the course design incorporates clear learning goals and ongoing feedback, providing some structure and clarity to support students navigate their learning in the arts which as a field embraces uncertainty and risk (Eisner, 2002).

A further key element is foregrounding shared experiencing through creative and body-based learning (CBL) strategies, which draw from arts pedagogy to promote embodied, experiential learning (Dawson et al., 2024) and are designed to build PSTs’ confidence and skills through active participation in arts activities that model creative teaching practices.

These strategies bring students into relation with arts concepts and processes, in dialogue with other students, and their lived experiences. They engage students in enacting pedagogical skills such as building relationships, articulating concepts, demonstrating processes and critically reflecting on their experience through an assessed ePortfolio website that documents their arts learning story, a microteach group project and written reflection. In doing so, these strategies build PSTs’ confidence in embodied practices and connect PSTs to arts concepts and content.

These two key elements – ethics of care and creative body-based learning (CBL) – form a firm foundation on which arts learning is taught and experienced. They both underpin PSTs’ arts learning and become tenets of practice for their future teaching.

This pedagogy transcends the static nature of speech and language, enabling students to become “active makers of meaning” who use multimodal resources to create forms of signification (Ivinson, 2012, p. 503). Future arts educators are called upon to prepare their own students to engage deeply with both the intellectual and the embodied aspects of learning, fostering a dynamic, inclusive, and transformative educational experience that values all forms of knowledge.

The assessment structure in the course was deliberately designed as a form of personal and cultural exploration. PSTs progressively demonstrate evidence of their learning in a highly personal way, integrating critical analysis of texts and resources, with the use of storying, defined as “the act of making and remaking meaning through stories” (Phillips et al., 2018, p. 7). PSTs share meaningful connections to artworks and art making through stories as they build confidence to combine new ideas about arts learning with their own and peers’ Funds of Knowledge (FoK) (Genzuk, 1999; González et al., 2006). Course learning outcomes balance developing an arts sensibility with understanding of the arts curriculum.

The methodology used by the authors in constructing this article is conceptual and dialogic. Tutors’ and lecturers’ reflections and dialogue in constant response to PSTs’ engagement and feedback made visible the reciprocal processes of co-construction employed to continuously refine the course content and processes.

Research Background to the Redesign

Biesta (2017) articulates an educational middle ground between instrumental views of arts education where arts are important for what they can do for achievement in other curriculum domains or for desirable personal qualities and alternative views of “arts for art’s sake” (p. 13), where individual expression is privileged without concern for the quality of what is expressed. The middle ground is a “worldly space” (p. 16) where arts encounters put students in dialogue with the world, negotiating their desires in the face of material or social resistance; a constant challenge to exist in a world worth living in. Furthermore, Biesta’s (2014) conceptions of education as itself risky, reliant on active rather than predictable processes of meaning making, are warrant for arts pedagogies.

Franks et al. (2014) and Greene (1995) reinforce the importance of embodied learning and experience in arts pedagogy, where imagination, aesthetics and encounters with difference are key components. It is these shared, embodied experiences which have potential to work within the risky educative ground for which Biesta advocates. When learners interact with artistic production and engage in reflective processes, arts practices become authentic educative experiences (Dewey, 1934; Kraehe & Brown, 2011). This embodied learning experience can not merely be an intellectual or cognitive exercise; it must encompass the spectrum of cognitive, affective, and social engagement with art (Dawson & Lee, 2018). Thus, returning to the challenge of teachers’ self-efficacy (Lemon & Garvis, 2013), if university arts courses are to build PSTs’ motivation and confidence in arts teaching, transformative arts experiences need to be at the core.

Drawing on Biesta’s (2014, 2017) arguments about the transformative potential of arts pedagogy, the course intentionally creates safe, relational spaces where PSTs can engage in embodied, aesthetic experiences. These experiences enable students to explore, reflect, and develop an awareness of what aesthetics entails, while simultaneously building the confidence and relational capacities needed to teach creatively. By foregrounding democratic engagement and disrupting traditional hierarchies of knowledge, PSTs learn to value diverse perspectives, co-construct understanding, and foster inclusive learning environments. This integration of aesthetic, relational, and democratic principles equips PSTs to deliver high-quality, innovative arts education that is responsive to diverse student needs and cultivates transformative, participatory learning in Australian schools and early childhood settings.

Our arts teaching team, comprising the coordinators, lecturers and tutors designing and teaching in the course, worked strongly with these principles of democratic engagement and disruption of hierarchies of knowledge through our course re-design for the Foundations of Arts course. Underlying the course is our shared belief that transformative arts learning occurs when learners engage with the holistic aspects of artistic work – understanding not just the principles behind a work of art, but also the lived experience of creating and reflecting on it in concert with others (Efland, 2007). The concept of an ethics of care (MacGill, 2016) and shared experience through CBL (Dawson et al., 2024; Meiners et al., 2019) provide a valuable framework for course development and are explored in the next sections.

Ethics of Care

Noddings developed the theory of ethics of care (1984, 2001), originally focussing on white, middle-class values that shaped the concept of care within Western discourse. The concept of ethics of care has been framed and defined by key theorists in the global North (Diller, 2018; Noddings, 1984; Rolón-Dow, 2005); however, there is growing acknowledgement that care practices vary across communities and cultures (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014), that universal understandings of care based on a white, middle-class perspective are narrow and culturally specific (MacGill, 2016), and that ethics of care has political dimensions (Tronto, 2013). MacGill (2023) brought together feminist and critical perspectives (Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Walkerdine, 1992), perspectives of race from Black American scholars (Thompson, 1998) and Indigenous perspectives (Rigney, 1999; Sarra, 2003) to understand care as a diverse and culturally informed concept that shapes pedagogy and serves as a mediating factor in teaching practices. Maher and colleagues (2024), observe how managerial discourses of higher education run counter to the exercise of an ethics of care, thus indicating that enacting ethics of care within university teaching is an act of resistance. The ethics of care which underpins our team’s pedagogies and approach to arts teaching in this paper aims to work through collective action to include diverse, culturally informed and critical perspectives. This is evident in ensuring that our choice of arts resources and pedagogies respond to and represent diverse lived experiences such as culture, disability, material circumstances, and gender.

We consider the cultural, linguistic, and social diversity of our cohorts of PSTs as representative of the future students they will teach. Anecdotally, members of our teaching team have noted that the experiences that PSTs bring to the course are not only diverse across arts experiences but also educationally diverse. The concept of Funds of Knowledge (FoK), as introduced by Gonzalez et al.(2006), emphasises the importance of recognising and valuing the culturally accumulated knowledge that students bring to the classroom. Historically, FoK has challenged the deficit narrative that assumes students from diverse backgrounds lack knowledge or competence. Instead, it asserts that individuals’ social, economic, and productive activities within their communities equip them with valuable skills and knowledge that are essential for personal and collective well-being (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014; González et al., 2006). In recognising the FoK of our PSTs, we recognise the need to work within an ethic of care that fosters a community of learning, where care is not only about individual relationships but also the collective development of a space that is inclusive, empathetic, and transformative.

Moving beyond these original frameworks, we expanded the notion of care towards a concept of hospitality where diverse identities are welcomed through “specific practices that are spatial, affective, and material” (Zembylas, 2020, p. 43). Importantly this is not a universal view of space where comfort is assured, rather it is about working with tensions and uncertainties in the process of welcoming diversity, Indigenous perspectives of place, culture, and country, which are integral to this notion of care as all these elements share a location and are interconnected (ACARA, 2022a; Hogarth, 2022). Care, in this expanded sense, becomes a tool for collective, transformative change, centred on mutual respect, responsibility, and the creation of inclusive spaces for learning and growth. In our work, this was seen when PSTs who initially framed themselves as not creative or not “artsy” were able to reframe their identities as risk-takers who actively participated in the creation of marks, sound, story and movement.

Creative Body-Based Learning

CBL is directly informed by Drama-based Pedagogy (DBP) strategies developed by Dawson and Lee (2018) acknowledging the rich lineage of drama-based pedagogues including Boal (2003) and Heathcote and Bolton (1995). Both include interactive games, image work, role-play, and dialogue tasks to engage students across multiple dimensions. Arts academics at the University of South Australia, in collaboration with Carclew and Dawson, built on the DBP pedagogical framework to provide professional development for educators and retitled DBP as creative body-based learning (Dawson et al., 2024; Garrett & MacGill, 2021). CBL was intentionally developed to draw on the embodied nature of drama games and pedagogical frameworks in a way that makes the approach more accessible to a wider range of educators. As McLaren and colleagues (2021) argue, using drama as a primary pedagogy opens critical questions about learning, thinking, and embodied understanding – an approach that runs parallel to Dawson and Lee’s (2018) work, encouraging students to commit physically and intellectually to learning through the affective, cognitive, and embodied foundations of drama-based pedagogy.

The CBL strategies provide shared experiences through which PSTs learn arts concepts and pedagogies that are relevant for their future teaching, and these strategies are also consistent with the expanded ethics of care approach, described above. Pedagogies informed by an ethics of care approach support PSTs to negotiate risk and uncertainty inherent in their current role as arts learners and their future role as arts teachers. As an arts team, we co-create CBL learning design in each tutorial to build safe spaces for democratic engagement through dialogic meaning-making and embodied strategies. CBL allows students to engage with real-world issues and communities, fostering connections that are grounded in care, respect, and democratic engagement. Using image work with artworks as artifacts (Dawson & Lee, 2018), PSTs explore artworks that represent multiple perspectives of Australian identity, to explore and reconcile both the viewpoints represented in the artworks and their own understandings.

CBL’s core objective is not to achieve proficiency in specific strategies, but to expand pedagogical practices by incorporating various artistic forms (e.g. visual arts, dance, and music) and embodied approaches in shared experiences. These CBL practices focus on activating dialogue to share understandings, develop discipline-specific vocabulary, and connect new learning to students’ life experiences. Games act as metaphors to rehearse curriculum content, while image work uses the body or artefacts to create corporeal representations of concepts. Role-play enables students to apply learning to real-world scenarios (Garrett & MacGill, 2021).

As introduced earlier, throughout the course, students engage in a reflection cycle using the describe-analyse-relate (DAR) approach (Dawson & Lee, 2018). The PSTs reflect on their embodied experiences, connect them to curriculum goals, and relate them to broader contexts. The goal is collective meaning-making through deep listening and sharing of perspectives. By using embodied, written, and verbal dialogue, students demonstrate their understanding of curriculum concepts, individually and collectively, fostering inclusive, interactive exchanges that allow all students to engage meaningfully with the content while honing their relational capacities.

The Process and Outcome of an Ethics of Care and CBL Approach to Course Design

Teaching

Developing an understanding of the FoK and experiences that PSTs bring to the course led our teaching team to prioritise developing an arts sensibility within an ethics of care in the process of redesigning the course. This focus repositioned the role of tutor in the course and the professional relationships within the teaching team.

Tutors and course coordinators have become co-constructors of pedagogical approaches and strategies, actively participating as learners and educators. They explicitly model this with each other and with students. For example, in a meeting prior to teaching, the tutors practiced the CBL strategy ‘Check in’ (Dawson & Lee, 2018) with the prompt ‘Today I’m feeling……’ and through their responses shared their nervousness about teaching and/or engaging in arts practices they were unfamiliar with, while appreciating the support they felt from the team. Understanding these feelings of trepidation developed empathy on behalf of the tutors in relation to similar feelings that PSTs may bring to their learning in the arts and in education. Tutors model vulnerability by openly sharing their own uncertainties, for example, in demonstrating in an arts discipline outside their field of experience, thus modelling for PSTs that effective arts education comes from connection and an arts sensibility rather than only expertise.

The tutors growing understanding of their own and PSTs’ vulnerabilities attunes them to the importance of safety and challenge in the strategies they choose. For example, early in tutorials, to build community and begin unpacking PSTs funds of knowledge, the strategy ‘The Truth About Me’ (Dawson & Lee, 2018) is used. The tutor initiates the game with modelling of common statements, such as “The truth about me is I drove to class today”, and once the game feels more familiar, steers the truth statements toward feelings or past experiences in arts education, such as “The truth about me is that I am more comfortable with visual arts than performing”. The strategy builds community and uncovers commonalities and differences through reflection on past experiences, strengths and vulnerabilities, while also acting as scaffolding to invite students to develop their levels of comfort in the type of risk-taking required for self-reflection and sharing discomfort. PSTs often noted that the game’s movement and laughter created positive energy and a sense of comfort in discovering shared experiences.

The creation of an ethics of care amongst the teaching team provided a safe space for pedagogical experimentation, leading to transformative engagement. An example of such experimentation occurred when a tutor trialled using music to enhance the sonic environment during arts workshops. He curated upbeat dream pop-contemporary style music and played this each week at various times, for example, upon PSTs entering the room, during the practical making/creating tasks and the conclusion of the tutorial. This demonstrated how music could be used pedagogically for establishing class structure, such as by signalling important sections of the learning experience, and importantly creating a hospitable class atmosphere and learning environment (Zembylas, 2020). The use of music in this context also allowed for transformative moments in PSTs planning for learning experiences, encouraging creative risk-taking when PSTs were developing and implementing their own plans for teaching, and deeper connections between the experience and learning intentions, such as the ways that elements of music communicate meaning.

Sharing these moments of transformation, and the pedagogical thinking behind them within tutors’ reflective planning sessions supported each tutor to add to their repertoire of practice and encouraged further experimentation and creativity. These opportunities and discoveries supported tutors to let go of their hierarchical positions as knowledge holders supporting them to become co-learners with others including their students.

Assessment

The dual role of PSTs as both learners and emerging professionals necessitates an approach that models best practices in assessment. In the arts, where experimentation, interpretation, and exploration are the very processes educators are looking to develop in their learners, the inherently subjective nature of the arts present unique challenges. PSTs need to develop understandings of assessment design in arts education including how to navigate perceived tensions between concepts such as process and product, as they influence current arts assessment strategies. The course embeds this approach across assessment design with strategies we endorse for PSTs’ future practice. Our assessments are equitable and inclusive; intentional and goal-oriented; creative and culturally responsive; thus, responding to PSTs’ diverse narratives and experiences.

The online and face-to-face components of the course, including formative arts practices that provide opportunity for self-reflection, reflexivity, and personal goal-setting (Carmody, 2019; Dinham, 2023; Hogan et al., 2018) embodied through CBL strategies provide PSTs with the evidence of learning required for assessments. As such, we view learning as multidimensional and dynamic, and assessment as a tool to unearth, acknowledge and value diverse learning artefacts shaped by students’ cultural identities and life experiences, including those embodied through shared experiences with others in the courses. The assessments provide a structure for PSTs’ curation of artefacts to tell personalised learning stories. The inclusion of storying (Phillips et al., 2018) as a pedagogical approach in arts education provides a powerful means to embed Indigenous knowledges and cultural perspectives. Rather than “bolting on” Indigenous knowledges to the curriculum, we build these knowledges throughout creating an educational framework rooted in the experiences and cultural backgrounds of students. Storying also aligns with an ethics of care approach by emphasising relational, embodied, and community-oriented learning. This approach not only fosters a more inclusive learning environment but also builds confidence in students, as they see their knowledge and experiences reflected and valued in the curriculum (Hogarth, 2022).

The assessments in the course include an ePortfolio of learning, a collaborative Microteach with individual planning, and a critical reflection.

ePortfolio of Learning

The PSTs’ thinking is uncovered and documented at multiple stages throughout the first 6 weeks of coursework to capture growth over time, culminating in an ePortfolio website. This ePortfolio integrates PST’s reflections on prior arts knowledge and experiences with a curation of artefacts showcasing evidence of new learning and discipline-specific knowledge in the arts. Developing the ePortfolio demands introspection and acts of relating, making visible PSTs’ daily engagement in all forms of the arts.

The use of storying in the ePortfolio allows students to reflect on and engage with knowledge in ways that are both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant, bridging the academic and the personal. This is expressed in the creation of an ‘Arts Learning Story’ – a personal video narrative in which PSTs reflect on their experiences, and knowledge of and attitudes towards all five arts disciplines. Drawing on their FoK, PSTs identify strengths and areas of reluctance, suggesting ways that they might build confidence in teaching the arts. Although PSTs report that this task is initially daunting, it is scaffolded through tutorial and online learning activities using CBL strategies that support students to develop skills such as voice, character, and audience engagement to confidently share their stories.

Additionally, processes of critical reflection enable PSTs to reframe prior knowledge and experiences, for example, addressing misconceptions that the arts are assessed via completed art works, to authentically value formative learning phases and dispositions. The ‘Arts Learning Story’ video positions evidence of learning as one small piece of a larger puzzle.

The inclusion of curated artefacts such as creative work samples completed during arts learning experiences and resources in the ePortfolio, provides a material approach to supporting PSTs’ future development as arts teachers who identify strengths and areas for growth, and know how to critically select authentic resources for teaching.

Microteach

A microteach is a performative opportunity for PSTs to enact their arts pedagogies with peers through an embodied arts experience. Throughout the course, PSTs are scaffolded towards the microteach as tutors model potential microteach sessions using CBL strategies through embodied arts experiences. Modelled arts experiences are deconstructed through the Art Gallery of South Australia Teacher Tool Guide to using works of art as a starting point (Art Gallery of South Australia [AGSA], 2023) which in turn provides PSTs an accessible approach to planning. The AGSA guide supports students to develop ideas for arts experiences that respond to the themes explored in an artwork centring ideation, rather than replication. PSTs also become familiar with reflective practice through iterative use of the describe-analyse-relate (DAR) framework (Dawson & Lee, 2018) to reflect on the pedagogical approach used in modelled arts experiences and their own learning

Each group of PSTs develops a shared planning document which builds as they learn more about themselves, about authentic arts education, and about the skills, techniques and processes relating to each arts discipline. As a group, they decide on one 15-minute arts learning experience that they present to the class at the end of the course. As individuals, PSTs evaluate the microteach experience that they presented and develop it into a detailed planning document.

The microteach allows for original ideas to emerge as students co-create together (Miksza, 2013; Thomson & Sefton-Green, 2010) and for tutors and PSTs to co-design through an iterative and reflective approach (Osei-Kofi, 2013). Collaboration is central to the creative process in the arts, reflecting Biesta’s (2017) conception of the arts as co-constructive rather than a one-way exchange.

Critical Reflection

In arts education, critical reflection is a key tool for encouraging higher-order thinking and metacognition, where students observe, analyse, and reflect on their creative experiences (Cunnington et al., 2014). As shown throughout this paper, critical reflection was woven through the course to support both individual and collective transformation opening to new ways of understanding the world and our place in it (Biesta, 2014). This critical engagement fosters a sense of critical consciousness that can lead to meaningful social change, echoing Freire’s (1996) ideas about education as a transformative practice. In this way, arts education practice “forces us to think” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 176) differently within an expanded consciousness. Such encounters are not simply about recognition but about deep, transformative engagement learning through the senses and engaging critically within the teaching and learning cycle. Arts educators are encouraged to facilitate these encounters, by fostering environments from which collective knowledge emerges, shaped by PSTs’ own experiences and FoK. The relational quality of these pedagogies allows new collective ideas to surface rather than a simple reaffirmation of individual worldviews, opening new perspectives for both PSTs and teachers.

A visual metaphor for embodiment and active meaning-making, as discussed by Biesta (2017), was imagined through the creation of a perspective web where each thread represents the dynamic interplay between body, mind, and world in the process of learning. This metaphor provides a conceptual warrant for using embodied strategies such as ‘Perspective Web’ (Dawson & Lee, 2018) to provoke critical reflection. These approaches foreground learning as an active, relational, and interpretive process in which meaning is co-constructed through movement, gesture, and spatial awareness, rather than transmitted as fixed knowledge. For example, this strategy was incorporated during the Dance week and related back to the artwork Absence Embodied by visual artist Chiharu Shiota, an immersive site-specific commission at the Art Gallery of South Australia (Shiota, 2018). After experiencing and choreographing their own creative movements inspired by this artwork, students related the interconnected elements of line and shape as a metaphor of their learning through the creation of their own ‘Perspective Web’, using red yarn to symbolically connect their reflections.

Conclusion

This article has outlined how the challenge of building teachers’ self-efficacy and motivation in teaching the arts led to a Foundation of Arts course re-design grounded in ethics of care and creative body-based learning. Drawing on critical, feminist, and affect theory, it highlights our experiences of the transformative power of embodied arts practices in education and the effectiveness of combining an ethics of care approach with CBL strategies in preparing PSTs to teach the arts. By bringing the body and creative expression back into the pedagogical frame, we advocate for a critical pedagogy that values not just intellectual engagement but also emotional and aesthetic experiences. Reflective practice within real life scenarios invited PSTs to draw upon and think beyond their life experiences to appreciate the possibilities of the arts to engage and meet the needs of diverse learners.

Our conceptual exploration, informed by ongoing dialogue with each other and course participants, explored how using CBL strategies grounded in an ethics of care impacted PSTs’ capacity to re-frame their identity as arts educators. It is through this re-framing that tutors and lecturers have witnessed PSTs’ growing confidence in their own creative potential as they visualised themselves as effective arts educators. Our findings suggest that by creating a safe and supportive environment, PSTs can engage deeply in aesthetic experiences, while exploring and reflecting on the process of learning. This engagement fosters both aesthetic awareness and relational capacities, enabling PSTs to develop the confidence and insight needed to teach the arts effectively. Our exploration and experiences, as described here, provide a springboard for future empirical research to ascertain the impact of such approaches to early childhood and primary PST cohorts. The integration of relational pedagogy with embodied aesthetic practice represents an innovative and high-quality approach, as it not only enhances pedagogical knowledge but may also equip future educators to deliver transformative, creative, and inclusive arts education across Australian schools and early childhood settings.