A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF THE CURRENT SITUATION OF EARLY CHILDHOOD ART EDUCATION IN THIRD-TIER CITIES IN CHINA

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INTRODUCTION
A large number of articles has shown the positive impact of preschool experiences on children's early development and social skills (Altinkaynak et al., 2012;Bautista et al., 2018;Kocer, 2012;Mages, 2018;Magsamen & Battro, 2011;Qiao et al., 2021;Raluca & Bocoş, 2013;Theodotou, 2019;Yazıcı, 2017).Art education is important as part of the early childhood education sector.In the study, arts education refers mainly to visual arts, music, and drama (Yazıcı, 2017).Many scholars believe art education should be an important part of promoting children's development from early childhood (Bautista et al., 2018).From a macro perspective, the arts themselves are an essential part of social civilisation, which could also enrich people's spirituality.Arts education in the preschool years could lay a good foundation for subsequent learning by young children.It keeps children interested in learning as they should and positively impacts their cognitive activities, emotional, personality, and moral development (Raluca & Bocoş, 2013a;Theodotou, 2019;Yazıcı, 2017).Arts-related researchers have found that children with arts-related experience in preschool are more confident, cheerful, and better organised in primary school than children without arts education (Qu, 2006).To be precise, there is a growing body of experimental research that demonstrates that early visual arts education enhances the development of critical (Bautista et al., 2018;Phillips et al., 2010) and figurative thinking in children, whereas early music education helps develop their physical coordination and social skills (Yazıcı, 2017).This is, therefore, an area of great value.
The research, however, towards this area of art education by scholars was late in China.In the 1980s, some preschool educators not only tried to explore the fundamental issues of children's art but also began to focus on integrated art education and art appreciation education for preschool children, emphasising the aesthetic value of preschool children's art education and the development of children's learning, activities, and experiences (Wang, 2012).In the development of preschool art education in China, children's art research has evolved from monolithic to progressively multielement, and the values orientation of art education has evolved from imbalanced to balanced (Wang, 2012).Although the development of preschool arts education is still in its infancy, with the promulgation of many relevant government policies, it has been brought to a new level.It has gradually moved from being ignored to being widely noticed by the academic community (Lai, 2018).At the same time, it is gradually becoming a more important area for academic and practical communities, coinciding with the in-depth reform of preschool arts education in China.
There are two main approaches to arts education for young children in China.One is to systematically train young children in a particular art form's basic knowledge and skills.This education model requires professionals with a high level of artistic training, rigorous, standardised skills training for young children, and family-based individual education with corresponding level assessment methods such as examinations.The second is the art-related activities carried out in the kindergarten curriculum, whose main task is to borrow a particular art form as a medium for the aesthetic education of young children; it aims to make them love and feel the beauty from art activities and give full play to the emotional education function of art and to promote the all-round development of young children (Qu, 2006).Therefore, it is not specialised and focuses on universality rather than the mastery of skills.Among them, kindergarten education is the most mainstream position of art education because of its universality.
The target areas of this study are the third-tier cities in China.Most third-tier cities are large, with most of the non-agricultural population in the central town being over one million and with a sizeable economic volume.According to statistics, there are 70 third-tier cities in China, accounting for approximately 20.77% of the total cities (n=337) (Anonymity, 2022).The level of educational development in third-tier cities differs significantly from other categories of cities.

PROBLEM STATEMENT
The literature search shows many problems with early childhood art education in China.Art education is one of the five main areas of preschool education, along with health, language, social, and science education.Early arts experience is important for young children and supports their holistic development; furthermore, preschool arts experiences contribute to the formation of children's imagination, self-confidence, aesthetics, and creativity and provide opportunities for self-exploration (Çetin & Yıldız Taşdemir, 2022).However, in actual kindergarten life, art programs account for a relatively small percentage of the curriculum and activities (Hou,2012).This is not balanced with the proportion of activities related to the other four domains in most kindergartens in China.
Additionally, preschool teachers facilitate children's aesthetic and creative self-expression through the arts (Bautista A. et al.,2018).However, the problem is that teachers did not achieve the desired effect on arts education pedagogical practices in actual classroom settings; meanwhile, the art teachers fail to realise that their art literacy and skills are superficial (Lu,2021).This could result in not being able to realise the artistic potential of young children and hindering the formation of young children's aesthetic and expressive abilities.Furthermore, it may harm the development of young children's moral character, critical thinking, and social skills.

OBJECTIVE AND RESEARCH QUESTION
The aims of this research are 2-fold: 1.To investigate the current state of implementation towards preschool art education in China's third-tier cities.
2. To explore reasons behind the sufficient implementation of preschool aesthetic education.
The specific research questions that will guide this study are:

Importance of Art Education
This literature review begins with articulating the importance of art education.As everyone knows, art is an indispensable phenomenon in the human social and cultural environment, expressing culture, religion, economy, and politics (Dixon & Chalmers, 1990).Art enhances the ability to perceive society as the individual (Aryabkina & Spiridonova, 2017).People perceive the world in sound, colour, and text through their aesthetic ability in music, visual arts, and literature and express their worldviews through different senses.
Arts education as part of general education is relevant to the development of qualities other than intellectual discipline ( Arslan, 2014 ).As people prepare for the future, art education helps them to form their values and aesthetics.In addition, it influences the formation of their personality.From this perspective, art education will encourage people to understand themselves, acquire a healthy personality with a broad vision, and become more adaptable and creative to adapt to future life (Arslan, 2014).Research has shown that students who engage in artistic activities can achieve higher levels of achievement in the future; meanwhile, the arts have a more significant impact on students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Lloyd, 2017).

Importance of Preschool Art Education
Similarly, art education provides more possibilities for children's growth, such as its positive impact on the multifaceted development of pre-schoolers.A literature search revealed that art could awaken children's cultural awareness and improve their problem-solving ability and emotional expression (Magsamen & Battro, 2011).Growing evidence shows that diverse art forms can help young children further develop cognitive, social, and motor skills.
Visual arts enable young children's self-expression, literacy, critical thinking, and problemsolving skills (Phillips et al., 2010).Second, clip art and simple sculpture can benefit children's small muscle movement and hand-eye coordination (Arslan, 2014).Moreover, music and dance activities help develop young children's motor skills, especially physical coordination (Henrikson McCauley & Welch, 2015).They also help develop social skills and reduce anxiety problems and aggressive behaviour.In addition, drama education for preschool children improves their social-emotional skills and positively contributes to the formation of correct values in children (Szecsi, 2008).
In the past year's study, researchers demonstrated a strong correlation between arts education and young children's social emotions through an experimental study (Qiao et al., 2021).Using a sample of 300 pre-schoolers aged 4-5 years, Qiao et al. (2021) explored the correlation between art education and young children's social-emotional knowledge by conducting group art discussions and tests.The study sample was slightly homogeneous, including only children aged 4-5 years; however, other age groups of preschoolers were ignored.
Overall, the literature above provides a reference value for the initial section and the necessary statement of this study.In addition, current research provides a variety of perspectives and recommendations for studying the current state of preschool art education in China.This review focuses on four aspects of Chinese early childhood art education: value orientation, teaching objectives, and educators.The findings in this literature section can guide the current state of this study's preschool art education component.

Current State of Art Educators and Programs
The value of education depends on the educator's choice of educational function, which decisively guides educational practice.Li (2017) provides a detailed discussion and analysis of the current value orientation of preschool art education in China.The value orientation of Chinese children's art education in the new era has experienced a shift from valuing the social value of people to valuing the realisation of individual values.Research has shown that educators are beginning to focus on young children's joyful, healthy emotional experiences in art activities, especially recognising the importance of play in children's artistic creativity (Li, 2017).
Researchers believe that the goals of art education for young children should be formulated according to the age-specific characteristics of art education for young children, who need to have art experiences with full coordination of hearing, vision, body movement, and speech.However, many scholars have found that many parents and even teachers currently have misconceptions about the goals of preschool art education.Chen (2010) pointed out that the goal of early childhood art education in China is still misconceived as being overly focused on the mastery of art skills by young children, which is a severe utilitarianism tendency, such as the adulteration of early childhood art education, acronymisation, and one-sidedness.The limited article mentioned above only makes theoretical generalisations and lacks practical evidence.
Kindergarten teachers play an important role in preschool art education, guiding young children to awaken their artistic aesthetic and potential.The researcher, however, found that teachers lacked a clear and comprehensive understanding of the essential purpose of art education, teachers were confused about how to conduct effective art education systematically and scientifically for young children and teachers' art literacy needed to be improved (Hou, 2012).In particular, the depth and breadth of teachers' art-related knowledge and their ability to practice art still need to be improved, and there are obvious regional differences.Moreover, most teachers are mainly with university and senior degrees; however, only very few have graduate degrees.Meanwhile, it is shown that many kindergarten teachers have not received systematic and efficient training in preschool art education (Lu, 2021).However, the authors of this journal chose samples from two kindergartens in the same region, and the sample size was relatively small.Therefore, it is possible that the validity of the results of this study needs to be considered.
Similarly, there are problems in the implementation of art classrooms.During classroom observations, the researcher found that children were highly motivated to participate in art activities and were strongly interested in art.However, teachers focused on results-oriented lessons rather than on the children's individual feelings and creativity (Bautista et al., 2018).For example, all the teachers' music activity procedures aim at song learning while ignoring students' emotional and creative expression of music.
A literature search reveals that many relevant studies have focused on these areas.However, there is a lack of research on the evaluation mechanisms of art courses, as it is a gap in academic research.

METHODOLOGY Research Design
This qualitative paper uses a case study approach to investigate the current state of implementation of preschool art education in China's third-tier cities and further explore the reasons behind the insufficient implementation of preschool aesthetic education.Creswell Poth argued that case studies are defined as a qualitative approach aimed at exploring contemporary bounded systems and elaborating case descriptions or themes through in-depth data analysis.In this study, early childhood art education in third-tier cities in China is considered a case to explore its current status.

Research Group
The research area is preschool arts education in China's third-tier cities; therefore, the population of this study is preschool art educators within China.The target area is Liaocheng, a third-tier city in the western part of Shandong Province.According to documents from the Liaocheng Government Education Bureau, there are 1,214 independently set kindergartens in the city with 214,000 children in attendance; there are 18,800 kindergarten staff in the city, including 12,100 full-time teachers who have received professional education, accounting for 79.65% of the total number of full-time teachers.Since the researcher lives in Liaocheng, this qualitative study will use a snowball sampling method.All three participants in this study are preschool art educators working in three different kindergartens in Liaocheng, one from a public kindergarten and the other from a private kindergarten.

Data Collection and Analysis Procedures
This study used semi-structured interviews to collect data as three subjects were interviewed about art education.
The researcher obtained the data by conducting semi-structured interviews with participants and translated and back-translated the transcriptions to ensure the validity and completeness of the data.Based on back-translation, it was found that the similarity between the back-translated file and the source data is about 83%; therefore, the interview data was valid.
The researcher used manual thematic coding of the participants' transcriptions to analyse the data (Kamarudin & Hussain, 2019.).Identification, extraction, and categorisation of data after iterative reading of transcripts (Zabeli & Gjelaj, 2020).First, the transcriptions of participants' interviews were divided into many chunks of data one by one.The salient points from each participant's interview were extracted from these data chunks.These salient points were put into many groups in the following level of coding, then named the groups.In the next coding level, these names would become new salient points.After repeated constant grouping and naming, three themes were extracted from all the data (Kamarudin et al., 2018).That will be presented in the next sections.

FINDINGS
In Table 1, three themes were identified based on the data analysis by the researcher.That shows some information about the current status of early childhood art education.Objectives, value, the content of preschool art education, art programs, and forms were the three sub-themes included in the theme of preschool art education.Belief in art education and teachers were two main subthemes in the second theme.Funding was a less frequently mentioned separate theme that does not contain subthemes.These themes will be elaborated on in the following sections.

Themes
Explanation of Themes Preschool Art Education Participants mentioned the current status of the implementation of art education in kindergartens.

Educators
Participants mentioned the current situation of kindergarten art teachers.

Funding
Participants mentioned the current status of kindergarten investment in early childhood arts education.
"Each class has one Chinese painting or dancing class as special classes per week." Participant 1 said: "The kindergarten where I work offers music and visual arts classes.Children have two music lessons and two visual art lessons every week." "The African drum course is a special class independently chosen by my kindergarten." It can be shown that the kindergartens in which participants 1 and 3 worked various special classes.
The content of fine art classes is relatively diverse; children would be guided to practice origami, painting, and simple sculpture with Play-Doh but rarely appreciate artworks.However, the type of music lessons is slightly singleness as singing is the main form with a bit of rhythm practice and simple percussion instruments interspersed.
Participant 2 said: "I teach singing in music class, but sometimes dancing, percussion.In visual arts classes, I focus on crafts and painting.""We don't often appreciate artworks."Participant 3 said: "Music lessons are mainly for teaching singing." Participants also mentioned elements related to the evaluation of art courses.Teachers' focus on children's classroom outcomes has led to a tendency to evaluate outcomes in the art classroom while ignoring their learning experiences and interests.Such as participant 1 said: "Classroom evaluation by testing whether students have learned a particular song or showing their artworks." The researcher found that the textbooks for the art program were not uniform in private or public kindergartens but were self-selected by each kindergarten.Some of the textbooks were more systematic and were written independently by subject.Others were mixed, covering all five areas, and lacked systematisation.
Participant 1 said: "In our public kindergarten, the textbooks for the art course are independently chosen by the kindergarten.It covers five areas: health, language, science, society and art.It's interspersed, not systematic."Participant 1 responded that there is no separate art textbook in her kindergarten because it combines five subjects.
Participant 3 said: "Art textbooks are written independently by subject.We are recommended textbooks by many well-known textbook brands."

Educators
Educators were found as the second theme based on data analysis.The results show that there is an extreme shortage of high-quality teachers in preschools.All participants mentioned the general phenomenon of preschool teachers with low education backgrounds, such as college degrees.Less than half of the teachers hold a bachelor's degree; however, all the kindergarten teachers without a master's degree.
When asked about what the approximate percentage of teachers with a bachelor's degree is, Participant 2 said: "It's less than fifty percent.""There are currently no master's degree teachers in kindergarten."Based on the interview data, the researcher found that almost all the teachers had acquired simple arts-related skills and knowledge before entering the profession.Most of these teachers acquired art-related skills when studying at the college, while a few others learned through self-learning after graduation.Furthermore, all participants were confident that they could meet the requirements of the classroom despite their unskilled art-related skills and knowledge, as Participant 3 said: "The art skills I learned during the training can basically meet the needs of regular teaching." Participants also mentioned that kindergartens do not have specialised art teachers and that all of them are required to teach other subjects simultaneously.In addition, the professional development of art teachers was a frequent topic addressed by participants.Researchers found significant differences between public and private kindergartens in this area.Participant 1 from public kindergarten mentioned in the interview: "There were very few art-related training opportunities for me since I started my career, so I had to learn online by myself."Participant 1 felt there was a lack of training for art teachers in public kindergartens due to the neglect of professional development for art teachers.
Instead, participant 2 from the private preschool said: "I often attend art-related training, about 1-2 times a semester." Participant 2 believed that private kindergartens emphasise the professional development of art teachers.

Funding
Funding was the final theme of this study.Kindergarten's financial investment in art education is an important influencing factor.The differences between public and private kindergartens remain significant in this aspect.The financial situation of private kindergartens is much better than that of public ones.Therefore, there are plenty of art materials and teaching resources in private kindergartens because of the heavy investment in art education.
Participant 3 from the private kindergarten mentioned: "The kindergarten managers invest more in the children's aesthetic education than public kindergartens."

DISCUSSION
This study aims to investigate early childhood art education in third-tier cities in China and explore its existing issues.The current state of preschool art education has been presented in the previous section.Meanwhile, this section will address research question 2 to explore the reasons behind the insufficient implementation of preschool aesthetic education.

Art Programs
The incomplete course offering is one of the reasons.After preliminary research, it was found that the only art-related programs in kindergartens in Tier 3 cities are music and visual arts, excluding drama education.Drama education is important for young children to develop practical skills early in life.It exercises listening, language, association, critical thinking, and creative thinking (Susman-Stillman et al., 2018).The absence of a drama program is inevitably detrimental to developing young children's abilities.
Non-systematic textbooks and the shortage of hours for young children to participate in arts programs are issues in implementing arts education.Almost all kindergarten art textbooks are different, the quality of textbooks varies, and a large portion lacks systematisation, resulting in less effective art education classrooms.On the other hand, the survey found that young children participated in an average of 4-5 sessions of art classes per week.The researchers concluded that this amount of time is not enough for young children.
In addition, the art classroom teaching model is rather outdated.Most art classes continue the teaching model of "teachers demonstrate, and students imitate", replacing attention to children's artistic feelings with learning skills (Hou,2012).Such a model is not conducive to developing children's inner artistic sensibilities.

Art Educators
Most preschool art teachers have insufficient knowledge and skills in art.Teachers' art-related skills, knowledge, and proficiency largely determine the quality of art classroom implementation (Altinkaynak et al., 2012).However, most have only attended college training to acquire superficial knowledge and skills, and teachers are generally under-educated in Third-tier cities. Seriously, public school kindergartens do not focus on the professional development of art teachers, resulting in minimal participation in arts training after they begin their careers.Teacher issues are also an important factor in the implementation of arts education.

RECOMMENDATION AND CONCLUSION
Based on the investigation of the current situation and problems in the implementation of arts education for young children in this study, the researcher will make targeted recommendations.
They were improving the arts-related curriculum in kindergartens with drama classes.The drama teacher takes the children through a drama production, creates a simple drama situation, and helps them appreciate the roles' characteristics and express their inner thoughts and feelings with their words, expressions, or bodies.Enhancing children's social skills, emotional expression, and creative thinking through drama experiences.
The kindergartens need to increase the weekly amount of art classes for children.In addition, the government education system should standardise art textbooks for kindergartens to ensure that children use systematic, scientific textbooks to avoid frequent textbook changes in kindergartens.
The government plays an important role in promoting the development of arts education for young children.Firstly, it should invest in public kindergartens to improve the classroom environment for children and increase the number of art materials available.Secondly, government education departments should provide more training opportunities for art teachers.Arts educators are a key part of early childhood arts education because the knowledge and skills of teachers largely determine the quality of education.Therefore, the government needs to focus on the professional development of art teachers.
This study highlights the current implementation of early childhood art education in a third-tier city.It aims to guide early childhood arts educators to realise the value of the study.Furthermore, this study fills a gap in the literature on this area and contributes to the academic research on early childhood arts education.In future research, the researcher will focus on studying early childhood arts education strategies to provide educators with guidance for classroom practice.