Visual Arts Syllabus, Year 9

The content of US K-12 art education is open to debate. In the past ten years, under the influence of Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE), curriculum writers have expanded the school art experience beyond the processes of art making to include aspects of art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. While this practice reframes the context of art making to inform it historically and theoretically, it falls short of cultural critique, which can also include an incorporation of visual and material culture study. It is imperative that US educators look for other methods of teaching art that include diverse art forms and that reflect the interdisciplinary structure and social concerns of our contemporary culture. This dissertation reviews a State-wide art education curriculum that includes all of the above topics, art making, art history, art criticism, aesthetics, and cultural and theoretical criticism as it occurs within the classrooms of two state run schools in Sydney, Australia. New South Wales (NSW) divides its art education curriculum into conceptual Frames, the subjective, the cultural, the structural, and the postmodern,, in order to direct ways of identifying, investigating, explaining, understanding, and judging works of art (NSW Support Document