The Australian Curriculum – The Arts

For those teachers who will be teaching The Arts AC here is an overview from the Arts Draft  Curriculum document.  I have tried to put some key points in this post from the 150 page draft document.

Australian Curriculum: The Arts comprises five subjects:

  • Dance
  • Drama
  • Media Arts
  • Music
  • Visual Arts

The Arts in each subject has two interrelated strands:

Making – using processes, techniques, knowledge and skills to make art works.
Responding – exploring, responding to, analysing and interpreting art works.
In the Making strand, content descriptions focus on students:
  • Imagining and improvising
  • exploring the elements/materials/techniques/processes
  • shaping their art works
  • practising skills and techniques
  • communicating ideas through their art works
  • linking their art works to other Arts subjects and learning areas.

In the Responding strand, content descriptions focus on students:

  • reflecting upon their own art works
  • responding to others’ art works
  • considering the broader context of arts works, such as the social, cultural andhistorical context of the artist and of the audience/s.

The Arts curriculum in each subject is written in bands of year levels This is different to English, maths, history and science which are written to individual year levels.

Foundation to Year 2

Years 3 to 4

Years 5 to 6

Years 7 to 8

Years 9 to 10

The general capabilities and cross curriculum priorities are the same as for every Australian Curriculum subject area (for detail on these click on the link below to visit the full draft AC curriculum for The Arts.

Teachers use the Australian Curriculum content and achievement standards first to identify current levels of learning and achievement and then to select the most appropriate content (possibly from across several year levels) to teach individual students and/or groups of students.

Teachers also use the achievement standards at the end of a period of teaching to make onbalance judgments about the quality of learning demonstrated by the students – that is, whether they have achieved below, at or above the standard.

If you would like to read the content descriptions and view the achievement standards you will need to go to the link below to visit the full draft paper. If you are teaching in this area this will be a good starting point to begin familiarisation of The Arts Australian Curriculum.

Click here to view the Draft Curriculum – The Arts.