Arts Curriculum
Visual Arts incorporates all three fields of art, craft and design. Students create visual representations that communicate, challenge and express their own and others’ ideas, both
as artists and audience members. They develop perceptual and conceptual understanding, critical reasoning and practical skills through exploring and expanding their understanding of their world, and other worlds.
Visual Arts engages students in a journey of discovery, experimentation and problem-solving relevant to visual perception and visual language. Students undertake this journey by utilising visual techniques, technologies, practices and processes. Visual Arts supports students’ ability to recognise and develop cultural appreciation of visual arts in the past and contemporary contexts through exploring and responding to artists and their artworks.
Drama is the expression and exploration of personal, emotional, social and cultural worlds, through role and situation, that engages, entertains and challenges. Students create meaning as drama makers, performers and audiences as they engage with and analyse their own and others’ stories and points of view. In making and staging drama, they learn how to be focused, innovative and resourceful, collaborate and take on responsibilities for drama presentations. Students develop a sense of curiosity and empathy by exploring the diversity of drama in the contemporary world and in other times, traditions, places and cultures.
Content Structure the Arts learning area comprises five subjects: Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts. The Arts curriculum is written on the basis that all students will study at least two Arts subjects from Pre-primary to the end of Year 8. It is a requirement that students study a performance subject and a visual subject. Each of the five Arts subject is organised into two interrelated strands: Making and Responding.
Making in each Arts subject engages students’ cognition, imagination, senses and emotions in conceptual and practical ways and involves thinking kinaesthetically, critically and
creatively. Students develop knowledge and skills to plan, produce, present, design and perform in each arts subject independently and collaboratively. Students work from an idea, an intention, particular resources, an imaginative impulse, or an external stimulus. Part of making involves students considering their work in the Arts from a range of points of view, including that of the audience. Students reflect on the development and completion of making in the Arts.
Responding in each Arts subject involves students reflecting, analysing, interpreting and evaluating in the Arts. Students learn to appreciate and investigate the Arts through contextual study. Learning through making is interrelated with, and dependent upon, responding. Students learn by reflecting on their making and responding to the making of others. The points of view students hold, shift according to different experiences in the Arts.
Students consider the Arts’ relationships with audiences. They reflect on their own experiences as audience members and begin to understand how the Arts represent ideas through expression, symbolic communication and cultural traditions and rituals. Students think about how audiences receive, debate and interpret the meanings of the Arts