Attitudes of the students of primary education class teaching department to the visual arts education course

Arts education is taken by almost everyone as a paramount factor in people's education in entering into 21st century. The most prominent feature of contemporary civilization is the increasing need of education in parallel with developing technology. The necessity or even inevitability in contemporary education is arts education besides explorer, latitudinarian, critical cultural accumulations in request of humanitarian education. Concerns like the limited class periods of drawing-crafts course in primary education, indispensableness of projecting dense curriculum of teaching programms into annual plans, deprived of art course room or art room for class; all prevent hit of several behavioural targets. It requires a rapid and conscious drift from conventional drawing education approach in order to shelter artistic creativity of students from negative effects of such problematic medium. It is all known that primary education students are prepared for Level Setting Examination (SBS). Therefore they all concentrated on courses such as Turkish, Mathematics and Science and ignore arts education course. This fact prevails in middle education as well. It is a known fact that students entering into university are in lack of creativity and intellectual accumulation. Same is valid for Primary School Education Class Teaching Department. Students come to this department from different places of the country. In places in lack of mathematics teacher one cannot expect arts education to be. Therefore students identify arts education with artist education. Arts education does not aim to make the individual an artist though. The purpose of arts education course is to develop the individual from intellectual, perceptual and sensorial points of view. This study aims to determine the shift in attitudes of students after taking Visual Arts Education Course both in freeing of their preconceptions for the course and transferring their attainments into other courses for educational use. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.