Issues and Challenges in Implementing the 1999 Curriculum for Visual Arts: Case Study in a Junior School.

The 1971 child-centred curriculum for primary schools, Curaclam na B unscoile, has been reviewed and revised and the most recent curriculum, the Revised Primary School Curriculum (1999), has been introduced into Irish primary schools. Revisions to the nine subjects on the curriculum have been gradually phased into schools and such phasing in of the curriculum subjects is on-going. Alterations made in the subject area o f ‘Art and Craft’, under its new title ‘Visual Arts’, have been quite extensive. Changes to the subject involve a broadening o f subject content. In terms o f pedagogy, the 1999 curriculum for Visual Arts calls for a return to the child-centred, heuristic, teacherfacilitated methods espoused in the 1971 curriculum and emphasises the ‘creative process’ in children’s art work. Calling for a return to such a pedagogical approach implies that this approach has, to some extent, been lost in the classroom. Sugrue would contend that ‘it is more accurate to say that primary education in Ireland is more child conscious rather than child-centred’ (1990, p .5). He would also call for ‘an effort to determine the extent to which these principles need to be enshrined in practice, before it can be asserted that child-centred education is widely practiced in classrooms’ (ibid, p.6). This study researches the implementation o f aspects o f the Visual Arts Curriculum (1999) in a junior primary school in West Dublin. Within this context it specifically examines: The implementation o f individual/creative approaches in the teaching o f Visual Arts; The implementation o f guided discovery methods o f teaching in V isual Arts; The uptake o f new strand areas. The study shows curriculum change to be a complex endeavour where new curriculum change proposals g e t ‘caught into a complex o f institutional and cultural issues’ (Callan, 1995, p.105)