Arts Immersion: Using the arts as a language across the primary school curriculum

Abstract: Australia’s national arts curriculum has potential to realise the following benefits: cognitive, social, affective and curricular. This curriculum is designed for generalist and special arts teachers, but its delivery may be hindered by the prioritisation of high-stakes-tested disciplines and pedagogies, and reduced government funding to arts education across school and tertiary sectors. This may lead to a lack of opportunities to build teacher capacity in arts education, and diminished support for arts education in terms of time allocation and resourcing. The notion of ‘silos’, where the separation of teaching practices persists between teachers of different disciplines, discourages meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration and can promote less effective models of arts integration. Arts education embodies a range of intelligences and semiotic systems providing for inclusive curricula and educational equity. Arts Immersion is a proposed response to these factors, intended to be implemented through democratic generalist and arts specialist team-teaching in primary schools