Now more than ever we live in one world ...
This text provides authentic examples of studies of Asia and internationalised curriculum – how it looks in practice in a school or classroom. The case studies show schools at different stages in the development of whole-school approaches to integrating studies of Asia in curriculum policy.
- Index
- Key Curriculum Areas: Visual Arts
Key Curriculum Areas: Visual Arts
This primary school of 380 students is located in the suburbs of a capital city. In addition to its mainstream population, it has a large Intensive English Centre which caters for young refugees, at present mainly from Chile, Bosnia Herzegovina and Sudan, with other students from China and Korea. This introduces a high level of cultural diversity to the school's population, but as this teacher points out, it was there in the immediate neighbourhood anyway. When asked about the central aspects of her approach, she said:
The primary intention is to get students understanding other cultures which exist within our own community, our neighbours, and the huge range of diversity within cultures. We wanted to challenge and shift stereotypical perspectives. Our own neighbourhood is a very good place to start for that. These issues are a part of our local environment. There is a significant Asian presence in our local markets, for example - something most of, if not all, our students would be familiar with.
How do you include perspectives like this when teaching Visual Arts? When I'm working on studies of Asia it's always an integrated process. Just because you're working in red and gold doesn't mean you're doing a studies of Asia unit. You don't just pick up and run with an activity without thinking about how you can connect it with other learning experiences.
As an example, most of 2008 is the Chinese Year of the Rat and I decided to make that the focus of a unit. So I've talked to the kids about the traditions and ideas associated with the Chinese zodiac, how the Chinese New Year is celebrated and why. One of the reasons for this discussion is to explore what they already know so that I can connect with that and construct what we are going to learn about more effectively. Then we investigate. We look through books, trawl through the Net, talk about things which might be relevant that they have seen on the TV or elsewhere, all the time remembering that the Chinese members of our neighbourhood have a lion dance for their New Year, and so it's here on our doorstep as well. We talk about what Chinese New Year entails: things like present-giving, cleaning house, the sorts of food that might be eaten, and then make comparisons with how the students themselves celebrate New Year. It's really important to build that background. It's so easy really to make much more for the students out of a learning experience that way.
Chinese Australian artist Ah Xian is featured in the resource
Inspirations: Art Ideas for Primary and Middle Years.
In fact the way our curriculum is described encourages you to work that way. The elements that relate to my work are Arts Skills and Processes, Arts Ideas, Arts and Society, and Responses to Art - so it's made for that deeper approach and broader focus.
We've worked on the tribal arts of India which is a particular interest of mine. In terms of techniques we can introduce the calligraphy brush and its uses, but that barely scratches the surface of what could be done. We added a unit on Ganesh [a popular Hindu god with, in its visual representation, an elephant head] - elephants provide wonderful opportunities for content - but this took us straight into a consideration of comparative religion, and what did we discover? Lo and behold, things could be different, and sometimes very different indeed. But there are also some fascinating and important similarities across religions - the idea of a leader, a defining set of beliefs, rites of passage and so on. I wouldn't pretend it was any more than an introduction, but we considered Christianity and Judaism along with Hinduism and one of our Islamic students described aspects of his family's religion.
We could have just drawn elephants - and we did. We made clay models of elephants, and used them as subjects for appliqué designs. They featured on posters and T-shirts. But so much more was learnt by mining the ideas a bit more thoroughly and seeing the potential they offered. Asian examples consistently offer this sort of richness.
The Tribal Arts of India unitAn extract from a more formal account of this unit Inherent to this whole unit of work was the investigation of the way in which modern technologies and the increasing interaction of tribal groups with mainstream society and technologies impacts on the artworks that are produced. Through the Tribal Arts of India Unit, the students were first exposed to background information and given websites and book resources to enable to them to follow up on a technique or region in greater detail. Then, based on actual artefacts and pictorial resources, each student reproduced at least one piece of work in the style, technique or thematic content appropriate to a specific region. We have looked specifically at: the tribal and folk arts from the Warli tribe from the North of Maharashtra; wall paintings from Madhubani in the region of Mithila in Bihar; a variety of embroidery styles, motifs and designs from Gujarat and Rajasthan; the peacock, the national bird symbol of India, with its many design motifs from around the country; and the impact of the Islamic decorative influence on the use of geometric and floral patterns on tiles. By making use of a variety of artefacts, the students became familiar with the regions of India and how their geographical position and weather conditions had a huge impact on their lifestyles, the arts media available for them to use and the way in which extreme poverty through drought and flooding has acted as a catalyst to produce local artworks in a form that could be purchased and transported around the world (for example, wall paintings reproduced in a smaller scale on paper). Having preceded this unit of work with an investigation of the differences in Aboriginal art forms found within regions of Australia, the follow-on investigation of Indian arts and crafts by its geographical and historical state and regional boundaries was almost seamless. One of the more fascinating aspects of this was the similarities that were immediately identified between the two ancient cultures - especially that of the cave paintings and traditional ceremonial body decorations. |
"We wanted to challenge and |
