Asia Scope and Sequence for The Arts

The Arts have the capacity to convey meaning, ideas and feelings through symbolic, experiential, and expressive communication. Images, performances and narratives can influence an audience. They also involve both audience and the creators themselves in action, dialogue and reflection, and in imagining and exploring possibilities.

Today, across Australia, curriculum frameworks and syllabuses are underpinned by the teaching and learning principles of facilitation and engagement. Teachers, in their roles as facilitators of student enquiry, are assisting students to access and explore resources, tools and experiences that expand their intelligences. Learning programmes are designed to develop students' ability to synthesise concepts and ideas about the society in which they live, and to become critical thinkers and problem solvers. The Arts key learning areas provide a means of actively exploring the diversity of the peoples, environments, belief systems, aesthetic traditions, celebrations, rites and skills within Asia and Australia.

New digital and multi-media products, social and scientific theories, archaeological discoveries and notions of cultural awareness are continuously redefining the way we understand ourselves. While previously each art form had its own forms, practices and conventions, today the distinction is less clear due to multi-modal forms and computer technologies. Although Dance, Drama, Media, Music and the Visual Arts (incorporating art, craft and design) will be the key art forms referred to, interdisciplinary or multi-modal examples will form part of the Professional Elaborations.

Engagement in Dance, Drama, Media, Music and the Visual Arts offers avenues for the development and refining of ideas, and the integral processes of analysis, inquiry, synthesis, and reflection.

The role of the artist and performer is to communicate meaning through different media and technical processes. For the audience, an artwork is a communicating symbol by which people experience and explore ideas and meanings drawn from social, historic, cultural and environmental sources. The critic, broadly defined to include students, is the commentator who assesses meaning and worth through the technical, sensory, expressive and formal properties of the work within a historical, social and cultural context. However, it is important to note that terms such as 'artist', 'artwork', 'performance', and 'critic' may carry different meanings, or none at all, in the cultures of Asia.

The concept of the arts as a finite and identifiable body of work in Western cultures is continuously evolving. There are significant differences in how different societies in the West have viewed and view arts practice. Similarly, distinctions between the artist or artisan that may have been prevalent in the past in the West are now challenged.

Western museums and galleries may reinforce notions of what is understood by the arts. Most Australian museums and galleries have extensive collections of the arts of Asia, although what actually constitutes a gallery or a museum collection may vary. Australian galleries and museums may favour the arts of one country in Asia, or specific arts forms from Asia. In comparison, in dynastic China, a scholar-gentleman may have collected arts forms as varied as paintings, calligraphy, porcelain, carvings in stone or horn, natural stones, and lacquer. It is rare for the complete range of arts forms from an Asian country to be displayed in an Australian gallery or museum. Exhibitions may also decontextualise an art work from its purpose or origin. For example, sacred sculpture from Asia has a ritual purpose which is rarely reflected in a gallery or museum display.

In the absence of knowledge about function, purpose and history, the audience or viewer may rely on responses and evaluation criteria that may be only partly relevant or that may be different to the way that objects are viewed in the societies and cultures of Asia. For example, in the West, figurative art has been central to evolving Western traditions of painting. By contrast, in China from the eleventh century, landscape painting achieved a dominant position. On one level an Australian student may respond to a Chinese landscape painting in terms of its use of colour, form, structure, and brush work using an arts lexicon informed by arts criticism and aesthetics in the West. However, the artist's purpose or intent in painting the landscape may be only partly apprehended without education about the philosophical and spiritual nature of the work as experienced by the creator or viewer.

The Asia Scope and Sequence for The Arts aims to develop appropriate intercultural understanding of the arts of Asia through the references to content in the Professional Elaborations.

Now more than ever: In primary schools