The Arts – Relationships with other domains
Introduction
The advice for this section focuses on the relationships between the domains to provide students with multi domain learning opportunities that will help support their deeper understanding of the essential knowledge and skills.
Civics and Citizenship
Practice in, and responding to the Arts is the means through which an individual can reflect the world as they see it and develop a strong sense of personal identity from which to connect to the world. The Arts provide opportunities for students to learn about, contest and enact the values that are important to be an engaged citizen in the community. The Arts provide a safe platform on which students can express and challenge their most deeply held and intimate values in aesthetic and effective ways that reach out to the essence of what it might be to be human and the kinds of worlds we create through our actions.
Arts education in schools attends to engagement with the community through public presentation and performance of student work. School Arts events help to create community and a sense of belonging for students, enabling those who participate to develop a wide range of skills and behaviours needed to interact with the community and engage with organisations and groups. Opportunities exist for students and schools to participate and create Arts events outside of the school context, either in conjunction with other schools or the broader community.
Communication
The Arts offer a broad range of communication forms that enable students to understand and express different meanings in unique ways. Art forms draw upon physical, visual, kinaesthetic, vocal, non-vocal, musical and written modes of expression. Through Arts education, students develop communication strategies that assist them to make meaning, listen, express, view, deconstruct and respond to a diversity of art forms as both consumers and producers and to develop sensitivity and familiarity with the discourses of various art forms. Arts education provides students with the opportunity to explore different modes of communication including aesthetic, literal and conceptual. Exploring the qualities of arts works draws on research into the purposes, functions and audiences for which the works were created and presented. Students develop knowledge and understanding of the language relevant to specific Arts forms and disciplines. The Arts provide unique contexts for students to engage with and extend their understanding of diverse cultures.
Arts education encourages reflection on presentation, and Arts teachers and students engage in dialogue with each other and their audiences about the communicative qualities of art works.
Design, Creativity and Technology
The Arts and Design, Creativity and Technology (DCT) have a complementary relationship in that they provide students with a range of creating and making experiences.
The design process utilised within the Arts and DCT encourages students to identify and explore ideas. Both domains support flexible and adaptable thinkers who can examine and manipulate ideas, elements and principles, conventions, concepts and possibilities. Designing can be informed through access to diverse sources that require students to interpret, synthesise, implement and evaluate. Students gain knowledge when considering a range of possibilities in order to design the best route to the resolution of their ideas.
Arts practice supports experimentation and creative expression of ideas, allowing for imaginative responses to tasks.
Throughout production, the Arts and DCT stimulate, develop and refine cognitive, affective, creative, technical and kinaesthetic skills as students monitor their progress, refine their planning and apply a range of skills, techniques and processes to manipulate and evaluate materials, equipment and technologies.
English
Arts education and English have a natural affinity with their focus on a variety of print, visual, oral, spatial and auditory texts as ways of understanding, making meaning and communicating about the world. English and the Arts contribute to the development of multi-literacies in students, with the Arts giving students more specialised understanding of visual literacy, spatial relationships, and alternative notational systems for communication.
Skills developed in English and the Arts include: exploring, interpreting and responding to texts, and creating texts/works using a variety of media and forms.
With the convergence of different textual forms and the growing importance for students to be able to create and critique new media texts, the Arts contribute to students’ development in the dimensions of English in significant ways. In order to make and study new media products and texts, students need to be skilled in the various arts forms that are used to make these works.
Health and Physical Education
Health and Physical Education (HPE) classes are an excellent space for confronting and exploring new ideas relating to personal and community health. These ideas might then be used by students in arts works, such as dramas, media products or visual communications. Arts practice also demands close attention to both fine motor skills and whole body movement. Because the body is central to both Arts practice and HPE, both areas are places where learning promotes health knowledge, exploration and understanding of the body. Arts and HPE both attend although using different strategies, to safe practices in body usage, emphasising the importance of correct usage of the body to avoid injury through sustained, energetic or repetitive action. These activities extend students’ understanding and range of movement and physical activity, their requirements of specific precise movement and unique consideration of the aesthetics of movement in space relevant to the selected art form or physical activity.
HPE teachers can incorporate aspect of the Arts disciplines of Dance, Drama, Media, Music and Visual Communication into their programs through activities such as:
- promote health and physical activity through creating and making, visual, performance or multi-media presentations
- develop skill and participate in physical activity through creating and performing circus or physical theatre
- explore and respond to music through dance
- respond to the dance creation of others.
Arts education also provides opportunities for students to analyse and critique representations of the body in society, examine how these images are socially constructed and consider the impact that this has on their own body image. Arts pedagogy provides opportunities for students to explore issues and themes developed by the students, and adolescent students frequently elect to explore issues of health and the body through their artistic practice. Through both deconstructing how health and the body are represented to them as consumers and making their own critical statements through their artworks, students can develop discernment when confronted with media images.
The Humanities
The Humanities assist in developing an understanding of social, cultural, political economic and historic concepts and constructs. The Arts position students within society, both constructing and deconstructing world around them through different art forms. Arts education frequently takes human behaviour as its subject matter, and gives a complementary way of understanding the world to that understood in the Humanities. The Humanities can provide a stimulus for generating ideas for Arts works based on experiences and understandings; for example, through investigation of issues like sustainability in Geography, events at different times and places in History and issues of funding in Economics.
The Arts provide opportunities for students to develop understanding about how they are being positioned by world markets and economies, develop skills of societal critique that enable them to reason and interpret, create budgets based on economic predictions and to assist students to see the world from another person’s point of view. The Arts frequently challenge the status quo and raise more questions than they answer.
The Humanities provide research skills and the literacy to engage with some of these questions. Arts skills like visual analysis, technical drawing, storyboarding, illustration, representation and spatial awareness can be used to complement geographic and economic skills and skills of reasoning and interpretation in History.
Information and Communications Technology
As well as contributing in a fundamental way to the development and implementation of innovation and design in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), the Arts provide an arena where ICT can be creatively used, explored and integrated into the curriculum, including their usage for visualising thinking, creating and communicating. Involving students in the analysis, interpretation, construction and de-construction of new media, visual, and performed forms of ICT can enhance the complexity, sophistication, effectiveness and accessibility of their work.
The Arts provide opportunities for students to develop new operational skills in ICT, critical understandings of how ICT operates in the world through critiquing their experiences as both consumers and producers, and opportunities for students to develop their understanding of how ICT is impacting upon culture through investigations of evolving digital art forms. Convergence of art forms and the development of new art forms through ICT raises particular challenges for the Arts in terms of how art and artistic practices are changing and being changed by ICT.
Interpersonal Development
The Arts assists students in Building social relationships and Working in teams, both through the curriculum content and the pedagogies used in teaching the Arts. The Arts helps to develop students’ tolerance for difference and diversity through the engagement of each Arts discipline with the perspectives of other cultures, traditions, belief systems, socio-economic groups etc. Arts classrooms operate as communities of practice, where students build social relationships through both working in parallel and working together. Working in parallel, students develop sensitivity to the impact of art works through the responses of others when they present their work in both formal and informal ways. Arts pedagogies build understanding of the variety and complexity of the varied roles in Arts production/s and the recognition of differing abilities, values and beliefs of others.
Integral to the Arts is the necessity to learn from and interact with others and work effectively in teams to manage and resolve challenges in the production of group artworks. Group Arts projects enable students to work collaboratively with others in the process of planning, negotiating, compromising and reaching agreement to achieve shared objectives. Seeking, accepting and articulating feedback on both process and product is an important component of developing integrity through the Arts and these experiences provide a powerful vehicle for students to understand and acknowledge how and when emotions impact on the productive outcomes of themselves and others.
Language Other Than English (LOTE)
Languages invite close collaboration with the Arts. Creating, making, exploring and responding to arts works connects with languages in many ways. Arts education nurtures the reflective, deep and creative thinking required for LOTE and assists students to connect with new languages through broad and systematic experiences. Arts practice provides alternative forms of communication that encourage students to move outside the norms, practices and acquired behaviours of their everyday experience of their first language.
Arts study fosters Intercultural knowledge and language awareness. Cultural understanding is enhanced by immersion in the Arts forms of other societies with their implicit and explicit norms, values and beliefs. Studying different cultural forms of different Arts areas brings students to a closer understanding of the performance of social roles and personal behaviours in other cultures. Experiencing the expression of particular societies through the Arts practices of that society assists students to understand what is intrinsic and different between societies, as well as that which is shared and understood as common experiences across the world.
Language teaching provides insight into diverse national visual, music and performance traditions and also to the centres of arts innovation and excellence in non-English speaking nations. Arts programs can connect with the languages being taught by schools by choice of art forms, such as Chinese calligraphy, traditional Indian drumming, Islamic decoration, Japanese paper arts, Balinese shadow puppets, silk painting, folk-song and other art forms and the discussion of styles, key artists and performers, their lives, and the role and history of arts in the relevant societies.
Mathematics
The Arts and Mathematics involve student understanding of relationships between time and space, rhythm and line. Students gain the experience of these abstract concepts in various arts forms and mathematical ideas. Mathematics provides notions of scale, shape, pattern, proportion and orientation to the visual arts. In the performing arts, mathematics has links with aspects ranging from the frequency of musical notes through to the use of Fibonacci and other sequences in musical compositions. Mathematically related aesthetic considerations, such as the golden ratio, are used across visual, performing and multi-modal arts forms.
Construction in the Arts requires the use and understanding of measurement in the manipulation of space, time and form. Creating patterns in the Arts involves counting, measurement and design in different ways across the various arts forms. The Arts also support the development of critical numeracy skills, by engaging students in the de-construction of media texts. This can include a consideration of how statistics can be used to analyse hypotheses.
Personal Learning
Arts education draws on pedagogical approaches that build confidence, knowledge of the self and the sense of self identity of the individual learner through practice in and responding to particular art forms. The knowledge, skills and behaviours of Personal Learning are integral components of the Arts in developing effective learners. Engagement with art works can help students to develop understanding of the perspectives of others, leading to empathy and openness towards others. Students learn to explore and manage their emotions through creating and making, exploring and responding in the Arts. This engagement with the Arts facilitates the expansion and effective formulation of ways an individual can reflect on the world as they see it and provides unique opportunities for students to see the world from another’s point of view.
Developing skills and producing works in all art forms requires goal-setting, working towards objectives and prioritising tasks and/or stages of production within a framework. Arts practice assists students to understand the role of planning, persistence, creativity and innovation in designing, producing and completing tasks. Students engage in independent learning strategies and organisational skills to manage their personal learning through the rigour, practice and commitment required in study of the Arts. Feedback from peers, teachers and others provides students with the opportunity to build resilience and to examine the effectiveness of their communication through the Arts.
Science
There is a strong relationship between the development of observational skills, imaginative speculation and encouragement of curiosity and questioning within the scientific and artistic explorations of the world. The Arts provide opportunities for students to explore and communicate scientific ideas and to develop and practise technical skills: botanical and anatomical life drawing supports the understanding of how systems in plants and animals work together; the materials, techniques and processes of photography enable students to investigate light and the properties of matter in a practical context; music, drama and dance may be utilised to challenge thinking about scientific issues which affect society; graphic design may be employed when developing new products or solutions to problems. In their early years, students in Science use their senses of sight and hearing to explore the world around them and they may interpret and express their observations through skills developed in The Arts. In later years, their reliance on accurate observations becomes increasingly important in Science, with the Arts providing further avenues for the expression and communication of their ideas and interpretations to become more complex and individualistic. The experiential nature of both Science and the Arts may provide complementary learning opportunities for students to consolidate knowledge and skills in both domains.
Thinking Processes
Through engagement in the Arts, students have the opportunity to develop a range of cognitive and affective thinking skills and attributes. Arts processes assist students to understand, appreciate and reflect on their knowledge and experience developing their capacity for metacognition. The Arts focus on the development of the higher-order thinking processes required for creative problem solving, decision making and conceptualising while systematically developing students’ capacities to reflect upon and manage their own thinking. The Arts can be used as a mode of inquiry, where students apply critical thinking and analysis to information and experience and consider the possibilities raised through various art forms. They learn to take risks when generating and developing ideas, seeking, inventing and testing innovative alternatives.
The Arts stimulate creative thinking, combining it with cognitive, physical, emotional, kinaesthetic and effective ways of operating. Creativity and the stimulation of the imagination enable the exploration of perceptions and possibilities.
