Learning

The Arts

In the Australian Curriculum, The Arts is a learning area that draws together related but distinct art forms. While these art forms have close relationships and are often used in interrelated ways, each involves different approaches to arts practices and critical and creative thinking that reflect distinct bodies of knowledge, understanding and skills. The curriculum examines past, current and emerging arts practices in each art form across a range of cultures and places.

At Parafield Gardens High School we offer four distinct arts subjects that students can study from year 8 through to year 12:

Dance
Drama
Music
Visual Arts- Art from year 8, Design from year 12

The arts have the capacity to engage, inspire and enrich all students, exciting the imagination and encouraging them to reach their creative and expressive potential. The five arts subjects in the Australian Curriculum provide opportunities for students to learn how to create, design, represent, communicate and share their imagined and conceptual ideas, emotions, observations and experiences.

Rich in tradition, the arts play a major role in the development and expression of cultures and communities, locally, nationally and globally. Students communicate ideas in current, traditional and emerging forms and use arts knowledge and understanding to make sense of their world. The Australian Curriculum: The Arts values, respects and explores the significant contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples to Australia?s arts heritage and contemporary arts practices through their distinctive ways of representing and communicating knowledge, traditions and experience. In The Arts, students learn as artists and audience through the intellectual, emotional and sensory experiences of the arts. They acquire knowledge, skills and understanding specific to The Arts subjects and develop critical understanding that informs decision-making and aesthetic choices. Through The Arts, students learn to express their ideas, thoughts and opinions as they discover and interpret the world. They learn that designing, producing and resolving their work is as essential to learning in the arts as is creating a finished artwork. Students develop their arts knowledge and aesthetic understanding through a growing comprehension of the distinct and related languages, symbols, techniques, processes and skills of the arts subjects. Arts learning provides students with opportunities to engage with creative industries and arts professionals.

The arts entertain, challenge, provoke responses and enrich our knowledge of self, communities, world cultures and histories. The Arts contribute to the development of confident and creative individuals, nurturing and challenging active and informed citizens. Learning in The Arts is based on cognitive, affective and sensory/kinaesthetic response to arts practices as students revisit increasingly complex content, skills and processes with developing confidence and sophistication across their years of learning.

This rationale is extended and complemented by the specific rationale for each arts subject.

Strands

Content descriptions in each arts subject reflect the interrelated strands of making and responding.

making includes learning about and using knowledge, skills, techniques, processes, materials and technologies to explore arts practices and make artworks that communicate ideas and intentions.
responding includes exploring, responding to, analysing and interpreting artworks.

Making

Making in each arts subject engages students? cognition, imagination, senses and emotions in conceptual and practical ways and involves them thinking kinaesthetically, critically and creatively. Students develop knowledge, understanding and skills to design, produce, present and perform artworks. To make an artwork, students work from an idea, an intention, particular resources, an expressive or imaginative impulse, or an external stimulus.

Students learn, develop and refine skills as the artist and as audience for their own work, and as audience for the works of others. Making involves practical actions informed by critical thought to design and produce artworks. Students independently and collaboratively experiment, conceptualise, reflect on, refine, present, perform, communicate and evaluate. They learn to explore possibilities across diverse art forms, solve problems, experiment with techniques, materials and technologies, and ask probing questions when making decisions and interpreting meaning.

Part of making involves students considering their artworks from a range of viewpoints, including that of the audience. Students consider their own responses as artists to interpretations of the artwork as it is developed or in its completed form.

Responding

Responding in each arts subject involves students, as artists and audiences, exploring, responding to, analysing, interpreting and critically evaluating artworks they experience. Students learn to understand, appreciate and critique the arts through the critical and contextual study of artworks and by making their own artworks. Learning through making is interrelated with and dependent on responding. Students learn by reflecting on their making and critically responding to the making of others.

When responding, students learn to critically evaluate the presentation, production and/or performance of artworks through an exploration of the practices involved in making an artwork and the relationship between artist, audience and artwork. Students learn that meanings can be interpreted and represented according to different viewpoints, and that the viewpoints they and others hold shift according to different experiences.

Students consider the artist?s relationship with an audience. They reflect on their own experiences as audience members and begin to understand how artworks represent ideas through expression, symbolic communication and cultural traditions and rituals. Students think about how audiences consume, debate and interpret the meanings of artworks. They recognise that in communities many people are interested in looking at, interpreting, explaining, experiencing and talking about the arts.

Viewpoints

In making and responding to artworks, students consider a range of viewpoints or perspectives through which artworks can be explored and interpreted. These include the contexts in which the artworks are made by artists and experienced by audiences. The world can be interpreted through different contexts, including social, cultural and historical contexts. Based on this curriculum, key questions are provided as a framework for developing students? knowledge, understanding and inquiry skills.

Our Services

Year 8

Students undertake a term each of Visual Art, Dance, Drama and Music.
In each separate arts curriculum area students undertake learning activities that cover the Arts strands of Making and Responding and Viewpoints.

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Year 9

�� All arts subjects are elective for a semester in year 9

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Year 10

�� All Arts subjects are elective for a semester in year 10. Students may choose to do 2 semesters of a particular Arts Subject.� Students wanting to do an Arts Subject in the Senior School are highly recommended to pursue a full year of that subject to best prepare themselves for the demands of Senior School.

�� All performing Arts students will be required to participate in public performances throughout the semester.

�� Music students are required to undertake individual musical instrument tuition provided for by the school.

�� Dream It in year 10?!�

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Outcomes

Students aim to:

Explore arts practice, using imagination, idea development and skills through a range of techniques.
Be selective, adapt and use appropriate techniques, technologies and skills.
Be able to work as an individual and as a team member for specific purposes.
Be able to use specialised arts terminology and communicate personal beliefs
Understand the influence of history and society on contemporary and historic arts performers.
Be able to research, compare and critically analyse and contrast arts works.

Students aim to:

Explore arts practice, using imagination, idea development and skills through a range of techniques.
Be selective, adapt and use appropriate techniques, technologies and skills.
Be able to work as an individual and as a team member for specific purposes.
Be able to use specialised arts terminology and communicate personal beliefs
Understand the influence of history and society on contemporary and historic arts performers.
Be able to research, compare and critically analyse and contrast arts works.

Students aim to:

Use arts practice and imagination to explore social, cultural and environmental issues.
Draw on past skills, techniques and technologies to create solutions for arts ideas.
Be able to work as an individual or in a team conveying ideas to an audience on a defined arts work.
Be able to research, critically analyse and interpret arts works using appropriate arts language.
Understand and explain the influences of history, economic and political factors on contemporary arts works.
Be able to conduct independent research and analysis of arts works from different cultural setting using appropriate communication techniques.

Learning

The Arts

Outcomes

Design and Technology

Extra Curricula Options

Science