VADEA National Curriculum Bulletin

6 December
October 21,2010
2010 VADEA E-BULLETIN Vol.
Vol. 1 Issue 17

Welcome
This E-Bulletin is aimed at providing up to date information and resources on the proposed changes to
Visual Arts in the Australian Curriculum.

11 DAYS LEFT for FEEDBACK

Both the NSW BOS Online Survey and the ACARA consultation for the DRAFT
ARTS SHAPE PAPER will close 17 December. Please take the time to
complete each.

Some helpful tips on how to complete the ACARA survey can be found at;

http://vadea.org.au/wordpress/?p=1709

NSW BOS Online Survey ACARA Arts Draft Paper

Feedback on the draft Shape of the Australian Visit the ACARA site. Every response counts,
Curriculum: The Arts add your informed comment to each question.

This survey gives you an opportunity to The Arts Shape Paper is designed to
have your say on ACARA’s draft Shape of inform the curriculum writers on the
the Australian Curriculum: The Arts for structure and content of The Arts
years K through to 12. Curriculum.

Closing date: 17 December 2010 Closing date: 17 December 2010

http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.ed
u.au/surveys/arts-draft-shape.html
Face to face feedback with the BOS will start in
Term 4, with Primary School teachers. Term 1
2011 the BOS will conduct face to face sessions
with Secondary Arts teachers.
http://www.acara.edu.au/arts.html
*Please follow the links
Feedback can be done individually and
collectively. Contribute as a Teacher, Art
Department, Regional group, Parent, Community
member or Organisation. ACARA counts each
entry as ONE regardless of how many respond in
a group

If it concerns you that artmaking will be

However, it is important that you complete the
reduced to PLAY please log on and registers
online feedback now. your feedback.

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6 December 2010 VADEA E-BULLETIN Vol. 7

Curriculum Lite: McGaw’s Dreams Realised In Arts Education*

This week Professor Barry McGaw made a presentation at the Australian Association for Research in
Education Conference held at Melbourne University. I listened with interest as he stated that “we [ACARA] are
trying to keep the curriculum light”. I pondered the weight of his remark about light curriculum content, especially
in light of the heavy load I imagine Professor McGaw carries as the architect of the Australian Curriculum and
NAPLAN. This became even more apparent as he explained that “the ministers have given the whole curriculum to
ACARA”, just as the NSW BOS gave the curriculum to McGaw in the late 90s. Visual Arts achieved outstanding
results in McGaw Review Weight-Loss Program, shedding an amazing two 3 unit courses and avoiding the
responsibility of carrying the extra load of an extension course.
McGaw’s Curriculum Lite program certainly generates many more opportunities for Visual Arts to increase
our curriculum fitness by reducing our footprint. The problem is that students keep participating in Visual Arts
across the nation. We are in crisis. Visual Arts clearly has an obesity problem as the largest subject of any of the
arts. Teachers disobey the national agenda in offering rigourous and challenging programs. These are consumed
greedily by students who seem addicted to this diet of intellectual autonomy and challenge. This over consumption
is a bit of a problem but creatively solved with a well structured reduction program.
The opportunity for Visual Arts to again achieve outstanding results in contributing to the agenda, of load
reduction in Australian education, is supported by the strategic creative thinking of Professor John O’Toole, the lead
writer of the Draft Shape Paper for the Arts in the Australian Curriculum. Luckily, the new role Visual Arts is to play
as an artform in ‘The Arts’ means Visual Arts is relieved of the weighty responsibility of having to identify as a
discrete subject. Rather, Visual Arts is blended in a new diet formula, which assists in controlling the appetite
for the discrete study of any artform. The fusion of specific Visual Arts content within a ‘one size fits all’
concoction, brewed through the strands of generating, realising and responding- proposed in this creative
curriculum, abrogates the need to specify discipline specific content in Visual Arts. It lacks concepts, practices or
interpretive frameworks and only gains simple aesthetic participation. There will be no developmental continuum, K-
8 students will just play and scribble rather than learn conceptually and practically. It seems, under this proposal, the
desire for rigourous coherent has given way to the idea of less work – why do one artform when you can slim line
and integrate all five?
Dr Karen Maras
VADEA Co-President
Assistant Head - School of Education NSW
Senior Lecturer - Visual Arts Education
Australian Catholic University
*This is a calorie free version of Dr Maras’ original article. The complete version can be found at;
http://www.scribd.com/full/44729754?access_key=key-8ay2numc91pbyr2kbxs

In The News Would you like to contribute?

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, 6 December 2010
States Offered $155m Carrot
If you come across anything of interest in relation to
The states today will be offered $155 million in
the Australian Curriculum and The Arts please email
education funding as the Gillard government seeks to win
me directly and I will add it to the bulletin.
their approval for the national curriculum.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/states-
nicholas.phillipson@spc.nsw.edu.au
offered-155m-carrot-20101205-18lei.html
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 6 December 2010 VADEA E-BULLETIN Vol. 7

A Vision for a 21st Century Curriculum

What the Australian Curriculum in the Arts could be like?
This is an extract of a draft that Dr Kerry Thomas (VADEA Co-President) has prepared on what the Arts in the
Australian Curriculum should address. A fuller version of the proposal will be placed on the VADEA website.
It expands on the information presented at the VADEA forum in September 2010.
This curriculum would acknowledge Australia’s aspirations artistically, culturally, symbolically and
economically in an increasingly globalised world. It would recognise that visual arts, music, drama, dance and media
arts do and will play a significant role in the ways that individuals and groups search for meaning, autonomy and
cultural and personal identity. It would acknowledge that an escalation in the global desire for entertainment,
spectacle, festivals, variety, still and moving imagery, art, design, fashion and marketing edge inform the ways in
which contemporary cultures and communities represent themselves and make meaning.
In keeping with this widespread global interest, this curriculum would value practical and critical reasoning
and risk taking in the students’ production of novel, innovative and intelligible objects and things, and in the
judgments afforded to creative performances and artefacts. This curriculum would also celebrate the continual
dialogue between the growing multi-modality of interactive technology and the need for precisely differentiated
artistic discipline which inform and is continually informed by previous works.
It would acknowledge that concepts of the visual and aesthetic play a greater than ever role in the arts and
contemporary societies and the lived experience of students in so far as they reposition relationships between
aesthetics and the self, aesthetics and culture, aesthetics and technology, and aesthetics and the environment.
In this C21st curriculum the value of the arts and the aesthetic in education would be enlarged beyond its
traditionally accepted role of personal expression to include communication and cultural meanings. The arts are
positioned as involving unification in emotion, cognition and awareness in the mental and practical activity
of students. It is committed to students being exposed to a wide range of material forms of aesthetic
representation in the visual arts, music, drama, dance and media arts.

Extracts from proposed Aims:

As a result of learning it is anticipated that students in K-12 will:
• Conceptualise intentional relations in the visual arts, music, drama, dance and media arts with a view to
understanding the variety of agents that play an interrelated role in the existence of each of the artforms
• Be exposed to material forms of aesthetic representation - both their history and material engagement with
the practical reasoning through which aesthetic representations are delivered via designing, making, and the
critical understanding of artistic forms
To achieve these aims, learning in each artform should be engaging and intellectually challenging for students,
focusing on developing a depth of understanding over time.

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Email; contact.vadea@gmail.com

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