What is the EAPI?

The Education and the Arts Partnership Initiative (EAPI) is investigating strategies for helping 'at risk' students by using the creative arts to address adolescent learning issues.

The research team is led by UTS Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts and chief investigator Dr Anne Bamford. Co-researchers include the Department of Education and Training (DET) and the NSW Ministry of the Arts. The project also has the support of the Australian Theatre for Young People, Musica Viva in Schools, the Western Sydney Dance Action Program, Campbelltown Bicentennial Gallery and Bathurst Regional Gallery. This NSW EAPI project is part of a national initiative funded by the Australia Council for the Arts with projects also operating in Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

Two schools with diverse student populations are participating in the project: Merrylands East Primary School in Fairfield and Kelso Public School a few kilometres east of Bathurst. While Merrylands East is a western suburbs school with a high multicultural student population, Kelso - the oldest school in Bathurst - is located in a semi-rural area, and has a socially and economically diverse student population that includes a large number of Indigenous students.

The program involves students and teachers working intensively over a three-term period with the State's leading professional arts practitioners. While the teachers and Year 5 and 6 students in both schools are the focus of the project, the whole school community is also being encouraged to participate.

Aims

The primary aim of the EAPI (Education and the Arts Partnership Initiative) project is to determine how an intensive arts-based program impacts on the school experience of upper-primary school children, the school and the community.

Further Aims

• Enhance knowledge and practice in the area of education and the arts
• Test both a series of interventions and also the impact of professional and community development aspects of the study

Impetus for the study

Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching argues that “During the past quarter century, literally thousands of school-based programs have demonstrated beyond question that the arts can not only bring coherence to our fragmented academic world, but through the arts, students’ performance in other academic disciplines can be enhanced as well.” (South Central Partners: Arts in Education website)

Similar studies in the United States have shown that education in the arts has a significant effect on overall success in school. As well as addressing adolescent learning, the NSW project is also concerned with the students' wellbeing and community involvement.