Three different countries, culturally and geographically close to each other, present us with three different approaches to the integration of art, the school system and the individual. Just looking through the structure of the school systems (of interest) allows us to learn about the foundations of each system, while at the same time highlighting concrete comparisons. What is of interest to us is the comparison of similar, but at the same time very different, emphasised features, approaches and content of art education in primary school in three different countries, Slovenia, Italy and Hungary. In this Master's thesis, we first present the theoretical background, covering topics such as borderlands and neighbouring countries, art education and art education in border schools, and at the same time, the approaches, teaching forms and methods of art education for Slovenian, Italian and Hungarian primary schools are highlighted. The theoretical background and its contents form the basis for further empirical research.
The empirical part is the main guiding principle of our Master's thesis, which has been used to investigate the observed differences in primary schools abroad. We included a primary school abroad in Italy and a primary school abroad in Hungary. We used observation forms to record relevant observations during the observation and conducted interviews with art teachers who gave us first-hand details of the organisation and delivery of art lessons. Through the visits to the schools abroad and the interviews, the research shows how schools operate quite differently, despite possibly following the same European guidelines. A big reason for the differences is precisely the culture and national background of the visitors to the educational institutions abroad. We were interested in how an educational institution where two different cultures are present functions and how the learning activities of art education classes differ from each other. At first glance, the school systems seem to be exactly the same, but the main difference between them is the cultural approach. The observation forms were used to focus on the flow of the learning activity, its structure, how the students interact in the classroom, how they communicate with each other, how they solve and experience a given art problem and if they manipulate art concepts, technique and motif in a meaningful way, what the art task is and how the teacher prepares for the learning activity, if he/she has a teaching preparation and what it contains. Through the interviews of the art educators we gained a deeper insight into the teacher's perspective on art education, how the teacher works in the classroom, how he/she prepares and implements the learning activity in terms of the use of teaching approaches, formats and methods, what are the peculiarities of the design of the teaching preparation and what it should contain, and how much leeway do they really have to organise the learning activity.
In the last part of the Master's thesis we focused on the analysis of the data obtained from the empirical research, the analysis of documents such as the learning preparation, the interpretation of the results and the comparison of the latter with each other, in order to identify and highlight the key differences and similarities. The findings are summarised in conclusion and supported by relevant theoretical underpinnings.
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