Conference Agenda

The recent adoption and phased implementation of the Primary Curriculum Framework (2025) and its associated subject specifications represent a key stage in the ongoing development of primary education in Ireland. This study explores the implementation of the reform in practice, examining the integration of Arts Education (Drama, Music and Art) within Social and Environmental Education (SEE), which comprises the subjects of History and Geography. The study is positioned at a critical juncture where the “Knowing and Acting” of educational reform meets the pragmatic realities of the classroom. The Primary Curriculum Framework (2025) emphasises holistic development and creative agency, while also reducing the mandated minimum time allocation for dedicated Arts Education in Stages 3 and 4 (3rd to 6th Class) in order to accommodate an expanded curriculum.

This research explores how arts integration, through the use of creative pedagogies, offers a robust solution to this temporal constraint. By repositioning the arts as the primary vehicle for understanding SEE, rather than as isolated subjects, the research tests a model in which teacher–student collaboration and innovation blur traditional subject boundaries. Drawing on Irish and international literature, the study responds to a recognised policy–practice gap in arts integration, where curriculum intentions are frequently challenged by limited time, variable teacher expertise and the absence of shared integration frameworks.

Pending ethical approval, the study will involve an 8-week pedagogical design cycle across all four curriculum stages (Junior Infants to 6th Class), commencing in Autumn 2026, and will focus on teachers’ professional judgement and experiences of arts integration. Central to this cycle is the utilisation of the arts to facilitate learning in a playful and exploratory manner. This playfulness is theorised not as a lack of rigour, but as a pedagogical stance characterised by “possibility thinking” (Craft, 2005), metaphor and embodied exploration. Such an approach aligns directly with the aims of the Primary Curriculum Framework (2025), which envisions a curriculum where agency is nurtured through engaging and imaginative experiences.

Through a pragmatist lens, the research focuses on teachers’ perceptions of effective practice during the initial term of the new Arts Education and SEE Specifications rollout. The pedagogical cycle utilises Drama for perspective taking, Music to evoke a sense of place and Art to represent social and environmental change. Data will be collected through surveys, structured reflection, classroom observation and teacher interviews, providing insight into how creative pedagogies are enacted in classrooms. The research evaluates how these multi-modal approaches allow for the grasp of complex social and environmental systems, by centring the creative pedagogies employed by teachers at the centre of teaching and learning.

Drawing on findings emerging from the literature review, early analysis highlights that while arts integration supports conceptual connection and engagement, implementation can become tokenistic without teacher agency, planning time and shared pedagogical models. Anticipated outcomes suggest that this integrated model can help bridge the implementation gap between policy documentation and classroom practice by enhancing teacher confidence and professional agency. Following a detailed literature review, preliminary indications suggest that the playful and aesthetic qualities of the arts support classroom practices that help students connect ideas across disciplines. Furthermore, the study expects to demonstrate that arts integration optimises the limited time available in Stages 3 and 4 of the Primary Curriculum Framework (2025), effectively restoring creative space through pedagogical efficiency. As an emerging researcher, the author seeks to contribute evidence on how creative arts practices can translate policy into classroom action, providing timely insights for teachers, school leaders and curriculum designers, contributing to the successful realisation of Ireland’s new educational vision for primary education.

Design is deeply embedded in contemporary life as a practical, social, and cultural activity that shapes how people interact with artifacts, services, systems, and media. Consequently, education must support students in developing design-related competencies such as creativity, empathy, collaboration, and the ability to work productively with uncertainty (Iversen et al., 2018). International frameworks, including the OECD Learning Compass 2030, position these competencies within broader future-oriented learning goals, emphasizing cognitive, social–emotional, and practical capacities such as empathy, agency, and responsibility (OECD, 2019). Collectively, these perspectives recognize design-related competencies as essential for navigating complexity and contributing to sustainable futures.

In the 21st century, design thinking (DT) has increasingly been adopted across educational levels, from higher education in design, engineering, and business to school-based, often STE(A)M-oriented, classrooms (Calavia et al., 2023; Smith et al., 2015). Research in higher education demonstrates positive effects of DT interventions on creativity, teamwork, problem-solving, and other twenty-first-century skills (Yu et al., 2024). In school contexts, DT is frequently integrated through design, engineering, and making, where the combination of digital innovation and craft traditions strengthens students’ design competencies and supports meaningful STEM learning, agency, and equity when community, culture, and identity are intentionally valued. Despite growing interest, research on DT in primary and secondary education remains emergent (Lin et al., 2025), and guidance for classroom implementation—particularly regarding teachers’ roles—remains limited (Henriksen et al., 2020).

DT offers a structured and teachable approach for engaging learners and end users in open-ended, human-centered problems while supporting productive engagement with uncertainty (Carroll, 2014). As a framework for creative and collaborative problem-solving, DT integrates empathy, curiosity, and resilience with systematic processes for ideation, prototyping, and material exploration (Goldman & Kabayadondo, 2016). However, empirical studies in school contexts often lack detailed accounts of pedagogical implementation, particularly regarding teachers’ facilitation and design work (Panke, 2019). This gap is notable given evidence that teachers’ pedagogical decisions fundamentally shape students’ design learning experiences (Retna, 2016).

Addressing this gap, this paper draws on an article-based doctoral dissertation examining how DT can be integrated into K–9 education, with a particular focus on teachers’ roles in creative, design-oriented learning environments. The research is grounded in an in-depth qualitative case study conducted in an eighth-grade (14–15 years) craft classroom in Finland, where students participated in a 12-session design and maker education project co-designing e-textile products for preschool children as authentic end users.

This paper foregrounds one central analytical perspective emerging from my dissertation: teachers’ evolving and multifaceted roles in creative, design-oriented learning environments. Teaching design through DT required teachers to go beyond instruction and facilitation to engage in continuous learning experience design, design leadership, and reflective practice. By making teachers’ often-invisible design and reflective work visible, the paper contributes to research on design education and creative pedagogies and discusses implications for teacher education and professional development.

European research on art education increasingly emphasises creativity, aesthetic experience, inclusion, and digital transformation as central dimensions of higher education (Bamford, 2006; Winner, Goldstein, & Vincent-Lancrin, 2013). In parallel, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful yet contested force in education, raising critical questions regarding creativity, authorship, and the role of technology in artistic and pedagogical practices (Holmes et al., 2019). Despite growing interest in AI in education, its potential as an arts-based pedagogical mediator remains underexplored within art education research.

Music occupies a significant position within European traditions of art education due to its embodied, emotional, and multimodal nature (Bresler, 2007). In foreign language education, songs have been shown to support vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, pronunciation, and affective engagement (Ludke, Ferreira, & Overy, 2014). From a sociocultural perspective, musical activities can lower affective filters and promote meaningful participation in language learning (Krashen, 1985). However, instructors in multilingual higher education contexts frequently encounter limitations when attempting to integrate music into language curricula, as existing songs rarely align with CEFR-based learning objectives or specific linguistic content.

Recent advances in generative AI offer new opportunities to address these challenges. AI tools such as ChatGPT, Suno, and Udio enable the creation of original songs tailored to pedagogical goals, learner levels, and curricular requirements. From an art education perspective, such tools invite reconsideration of creative agency and human–AI collaboration within post-digital learning environments (Knochel & Patton, 2015).

Although the empirical study was conducted in Kazakhstan, it is conceptually framed within European educational and art education discourses. Kazakhstan represents a multilingual higher education context comparable to many European systems in terms of language diversity, digitalisation, and competency-based curricula. The study therefore addresses shared European challenges and contributes transferable insights to research on arts-based pedagogy in higher education.

This PhD project explores a new way of understanding subject knowledge in the teaching and learning of classic literary texts and their historical contexts in L1 in a Nordic upper secondary education context. This new way combines inquiry-based literature teaching (Hansen et al., 2019), the manuscripts of Hans Christian Andersen (i.e., his creative writing process) and their digital accessibility. By subject knowledge, I refer to the knowledge, skills, and competencies that students have the opportunity to acquire based on teaching and by L1, I refer to the school subject L1, for example, English in English-speaking countries, Danish in Denmark, and so on. The project is a qualitative multiple-case study in the field of Literature Education, and it is connected to The Fairy Tales and Stories of Hans Christian Andersen – The Digital Manuscript Edition, a digitization project taking place at the University of Southern Denmark.

The background of the project consists of previous Nordic, Dutch, German, British, and Australian studies in the field of Literature Education, focusing on upper secondary education. These studies have shown that teachers struggle to find engaging ways to teach classic literature that incorporate historical context, and that it can be difficult to engage students in this type of teaching

(Elf, 2018; Elliott, 2025; Pieper, 2020; Van Keulen & Spotti, 2024). These issues are often linked to, and understood against the background of, what has been referred to as “a transmission pedagogy, with teachers as the (authoritative) source of (authorized) knowledge” (Green & Krogh, 2020, p. 24), thereby making student learning primarily a matter of intellectual appropriation (Pieper, 2020; Van Keulen & Spotti, 2024). Since teaching and learning with and about canonical literature plays a significant role in national curricula in the Global North - a situation that has prevailed since the beginning of the “academic paradigm” in the mid-nineteenth century ((Sawyer & Van de Ven, 2006, p. 11) - the implications of the project’s findings are relevant not only in a Nordic context but also internationally.

Therefore, the main research questions at the outset of the PhD project were:

To what extent can teaching based upon Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale manuscripts and inquiry-based literature teaching open new pathways in the teaching of classic literature and historical context, which are not mainly oriented towards transmission? And to what extent can the digital accessibility of the fairy tale manuscripts support inquiry-based literature teaching and thus be a collaborator in this new way of teaching classic literary texts and their contexts?

To operationalize the study, the following research questions form the basis of the project’s research design:

1. Theoretically, what characterizes an inquiry-based approach to teaching of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale manuscripts, which also incorporates the digitization?

2. What happens when implementing a co-designed learning material based on the theoretical understanding of inquiry-based literature teaching in classroom practice?

3. What kind of subject knowledge does this new way of teaching bring into play compared to the subject knowledge of teaching that does not use the co-designed learning material?

The theoretical framework of the project is practice theory, specifically the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014). Drawing on the abovementioned empirical studies, the PhD project points out that the practice architectures of the subject are the cause of its challenges, because the arrangements that make up the practice architectures do not allow students to properly experience old literature. Hence, a thesis of the project is that by making specific changes in the arrangements of the practice architectures a new kind of subject knowledge becomes possible in the teaching of classic literary texts and their historical contexts.