Visual Arts in Years 7 to 10 contains both the Mandatory and Elective courses.
The Mandatory course provides significant core experiences in the visual arts for all students in Year 8. This course provides opportunities for students in Stage 4 to establish and develop deeper understanding of the content –subject matter, forms and frames –of the Visual Arts through experience in each of the practices of artmaking, critical study and historical study.
In years 9 and 10 the Elective course builds on the Mandatory course and provides further extension and depth of study in the visual arts. It is designed for students in Stage 5 who are seeking to extend their experience of the visual arts. The knowledge, understanding, skills, and values developed in this course provide a sound foundation for students electing to study
Visual Arts in Years 11–12 for Stage 6 is offered as a course for students with a wide range of needs, abilities and interests. The course caters for the full range of students through learning opportunities based on a flexible content structure consisting of practice (artmaking, art criticism and art history), the conceptual framework (artist, artwork, world, audience) and the frames (subjective, cultural, structural and postmodern). These aspects of content can be engaged more broadly and deeply as students develop increasing autonomy in their practical and theoretical understanding, knowledge and skills.
Purpose and Focus of the HSC course builds on the knowledge and understanding, skills, values and attitudes of the Preliminary course and provides opportunities for students to build on their understanding of the visual arts through deeper and sustained investigations of practice, the conceptual framework (agencies in the artworld) and frames, in increasingly independent ways.
Students learn about:
- how they may ‘own' practice in artmaking, art criticism, and art history
- how they may further relate concepts of the artworld involving the agencies of artist, artwork, world, audience
- how they may develop their own informed points of view in increasingly independent ways using the frames
- how they may further develop meaning and interest in their work.
Students are required to keep a Visual Arts Process Diary in stages 4 & 5 and both the Preliminary and HSC courses. The diary must differentiate work undertaken in these courses. It is expected that there should be some connection between what is in the diary and what is produced as an artwork and the body of work although it is recognised that the link should not simply be causal or determine the end result. The diary should be used as a tool in teaching and learning in Visual Arts, particularly in artmaking. Students can use their diaries to formulate ideas and their intentions for what they will do in their artmaking. The diary may indicate a student's research within the creative process. Investigations of subject matter, interests, issues, processes, expressive forms and conceptual challenges may be included.
