Learning

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.

Year 9