What are the arts about?
The arts are powerful forms of expression that recognise, value, and contribute to the unique bicultural and multicultural character of Aotearoa New Zealand. Through movement, sound, and image, the arts transform people’s creative ideas into expressive works that communicate layered meanings.
Why study the arts?
Art education explores, challenges, affirms, and celebrates unique artistic expressions of self, community, and culture. Learning in, through, and about the arts stimulates creative action and response by engaging and connecting thinking, imagination, senses, and feelings.
How is the learning area structured?
The arts learning area comprises four disciplines:
Dance is expressive movement that has intent, purpose, and form.
Drama expresses human experience through a focus on role, action, and tension, played out in time and space.
Sound from natural, acoustic, and digital environments is the source material for expressive ideas in music. These ideas are manipulated and extended into forms, genres, and styles that are recognised as music.
The visual arts develop students’ conceptual thinking within a range of practices across drawing, sculpture, design, painting, printmaking, photography, and moving image.
Each discipline is structured around four interrelated strands: Understanding the Arts in Context, Developing Practical Knowledge in the arts, Developing Ideas in the arts, and Communicating and Interpreting in the arts.