Within the specific context of The Australian Curriculum: The Arts, this paper explores how teachers of the Arts and teacher educators encounter and enact curriculum change. Adopting Ewing's notion ...that curriculum is a complex web of varying stories and storylines that are impacted on by teachers' underlying philosophy, we suggest that Arts teachers embrace the intent behind The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. This paper unearths and explores insights gleaned from teachers looking inward and reflecting on their own personal curriculum journeys. The learning dimensions of conceptualising, experimenting and developing, reflecting, resolving and communicating are applied to investigate the implementation of the new curriculum. This article shares data from a number of Arts teachers' interviews with the authors in relation to their thoughts on the implementation of the new curriculum. Two key themes emerged from these interviews, these being navigating challenges and the implications of personal attributes in encountering and enacting change. Interestingly, a number of qualities associated with Arts practitioners such as creative and lateral thinking, resilience and flexibility emerge as significant contributing factors in regard to how teachers encounter, enact and become curriculum change.
This article questions the current situation for vocational acting training (VAT) in the UK. It aims to provide an update on the report into burgeoning provision of acting training (and the attempt ...to address subsequent high rates of actor unemployment) that was originally undertaken
by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (CGF, 1975) in their publication entitled
Going on the Stage
. The article will suggest that the continued proliferation of VAT offered at tertiary level, allied to the dearth of career opportunities for graduates, means that the current training
offer is not entirely fit for purpose. It will further propose that VAT requires a widening of the curriculum offer in order to provide meaningful vocational workplace readiness for course graduates at a time when, as Malcolm Sinclair, president of the British actors' union, Equity, acknowledges,
'there are too many actors and too few jobs' (in Clark, 2014a: 17). To address the question of VAT and employability in the UK, this article will reconsider the three questions initially posed in
Going on the Stage
(CGF, 1975: 7). These were: why is drama training necessary, to what
extent do the present arrangements fall short of the ideal, and what should VAT entail? By re-posing these questions, this article will present the contemporary context of VAT, review the status of progression rates into employment, and propose a case for curriculum extension in light of the
findings.
Writing, a critical pedagogical tool, cultivates student learning and fosters deeper understanding of the material. When frequent, low -stakes (informal) writing activities help students write more ...freely, engage with the material and thus become active learners. Looking at students who are at opposite ends of a community college spectrum, this article compares and contrasts students' writing skills using low-stakes assignments, including peer-reviewing of each other's work, in a capstone course and in a First-Year Seminar in terms of organization, clarity in communication and content analysis. The data generated from this study stem from an interdisciplinary collaboration among three instructors from Humanities, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, with the goal of creating a network between students in First-Year Seminars and students in the capstone course. Research methods in this context included assigning common readings to students in different classes on the theme of Women in STEM. It also included a peer review component: students reviewed each other's assignments and instructors visited each other's class to lead a discussion on the paucity of women in the fields of sciences or as Nobel Prize winner, with the additional aim of improving women's interest in STEM courses.
In September 2015, the Australian Federal Government endorsed the final version of the Australian Curriculum arts framework a document resulting from nearly seven years of consultation and ...development. The Australian Curriculum: The Arts Version 8.0 comprises five subjects: dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts. This article considers the curriculum development process and highlights interplays between decisions and decision-makers. Now available for implementation in each state and territory of Australia, the nature and structure of the framework remains in question with regard to what aspects of the curriculum will be supported for implementation in each state. At the time of writing, not one state education authority has guaranteed that the curriculum, as written and in full, will be implemented. As a result Drama remains outside the educational entitlement for all children in Australia.
New Zealand vignette O'Connor, Peter
Research in drama education,
01/2016, Letnik:
21, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This vignette considers the manner in which neo liberal reforms of education have impacted on the manner and scope of arts provision in New Zealand schools.
The arts school partnerships under the policy '40x40' in Bogotá-Colombia are an example of the international interest in new ways to redress social and educational disadvantages. The main purpose of ...the policy is to improve education by gradually extending school daytime. This vignette explores three important issues for the implementation of arts education in this policy: cross-sector dynamics, cultural infrastructure and emergent curriculum. Information provided is based on the study 'Bridging the Divided: Challenges for the Evaluation of Arts Education in the Policy "40x40" in Bogotá-Colombia' (Cárdenas, 2014). In addition, policy managers were interviewed for writing the vignette.
Augustine and the liberal arts Kenyon, Erik
Arts and humanities in higher education,
02/2013, Letnik:
12, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In an early dialogue, On Order, Augustine sets out a program for thinking about thinking. Through such reflections, students attain self-knowledge and prepare for philosophical inquiry. The liberal ...arts are useful for this project, insofar as they provide opportunities for thinking, yet they are not ultimately necessary. I suggest that On Order’s program, correctly understood, provides a rationale for Augustine’s beginning but never completing a set of works on the seven liberal arts, and that his approach has contemporary relevance. Current discussions of the liberal arts move between concerns for particular content, which after a canon war may seem political or arbitrary, and useful skills, which reduce the liberal arts to quasi-vocational programs. Augustine’s focus on rational activity escapes the content/skills dilemma and gives us a fresh perspective on the liberal arts’ value.
Abstract
In this chapter, I consider arguments for aligning ELA with the demands of a soon-to-arrive knowledge economy. I ask how these arguments call ELA teachers to prepare students to work in an ...economy that values creativity, interpretation, and cutting-edge literacies – the stock-in-trade of ELA classes. Although these arguments have many strengths – they play down standardization and play up creativity – they rest on faulty assumptions about the number and distribution of high-skills jobs in the near future. Most people will not perform work that leverages creativity and cutting-edge knowledge. Given this reality, I ask how teachers of ELA teachers can take what’s good in the knowledge economy approach and adapt it so diverse students can acquire literacies that may help them succeed in and, perhaps, transform the economic field. This more viable approach to ELA calls teachers to teach not only economically valuable forms of reading and writing but also ways of critiquing and changing economies in line with democratic principles. I illustrate the latter approach to ELA instruction with a scenario activity for a unit on A Raisin in the Sun.
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