Mastering Primary Art and Design

Peter Gregory, Claire March, Suzy Tutchell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781474294874
• eBook ISBN: 9781474294898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Mastering Primary Art and Design introduces the primary art and design curriculum and helps trainees and teachers learn how to plan and teach inspiring lessons that make learning art and design irresistible. Topics covered include:
· Current developments in art and design
· Art and design as an irresistible activity
· Art and design as a practical activity
· Skills to develop in art and design
· Promoting curiosity
· Assessing children in art and design
· Practical issues This guide includes examples of children's work, case studies, readings to reflect upon and reflective questions that all help to show students and teachers what is considered to be best and most innovative practice, and how they can use that knowledge in their own teaching to the greatest effect. The book draws on the experience of three leading professionals in primary art and design, Peter Gregory, Claire March and Suzy Tutchell, to provide the essential guide to teaching art and design for all trainee and qualified primary teachers.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Primary Art and Design

This chapter deals with the rather basic but incredibly important questions:

• • What is primary Art and Design?
• • Why should it be taught?
• • What does it mean to be artistic and how does this link to the curriculum subject?
• • How can Art and Design contribute to a child’s whole education?

Without a good understanding of these issues, we would argue there is a very strong likelihood of building activities in the classroom that simply do not enrich children’s experiences in the short term or provide a robust framework for growing artistic endeavour for recreation, employment or creative industry in the longer term. Before we begin to unpick each question, it would be useful to briefly consider the current statutory expectations for the subject in the context of the journey to the current time.

Quick pause moment – Think about the value of Art and Design in education:

• • What do you think is the point of Art and Design as a school subject?
• • What do think that children learn from studying Art and Design?
• • How would you explain to a child why we are doing Art and Design in class today?

An introduction to primary Art and Design

Prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum, primary education embraced the subject we would today refer to as ‘Art and Design’ in a number of ways. Firstly, from Victorian times, the subject of ‘drawing’ was considered fundamental to a well-rounded education. It often reflected the classical approach to reproducing a likeness of reality by drawing a range of objects from different angles. The linkage with geometric elements of mathematics was always acknowledged but the importance of children being taught to observe closely also related to the making of objects in the future. There are many who forget that the fourth ‘R’ in traditional education referred to ‘routing’ – the act of creating things. Without this, the place of drawing is often relegated to a position of lesser importance in our minds today.

After the Second World War, the creative processes of art were regarded as important to allow humanity to both explore and define the avenues of hope for the future. It was with this in mind that people like Herbert Read and Marion Richardson argued strongly for increasing the place of art in the primary curriculum. They understood art as being more than drawing and even more than simply reproducing observed artefacts. The art world across the twentieth century had increasingly explored other forms and the now-famous artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Hannah Höch, Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keefe, Cornelia Parker and many others besides, have caused this thinking to be interwoven into mainstream art. The so-called ‘child art’ movement applied the thinking to children and the notion that children themselves could be artists in their own right increasingly affected the practice in many classrooms (Macdonald, 2004). All of these influences resulted in the birth of the International Society for Education through Art under the aegis of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

By the time of the Plowden Report in 1967, art was a major component of learning in primary schools. It was not at all uncommon for many art processes to be taught and explored at the same time in the classroom. There was little expectation of a defined curriculum to be covered and the importance of actually making art was reflected throughout all the subjects studied. Art at this time was seen as an activity rather than a lesson of received instruction (Lancaster, 1987). Most primary schools engaged in significant art-based activities throughout the academic year for pupils of all ages but this was set to change dramatically as teachers ‘were challenged by the emergence and demands of the new national curriculum’ (Clement and Tarr, 1992: 1).

The first National Curriculum for England was born in 1989 and although art was a planned subject within the suite of subjects that schools were required to teach, its official programme of study (Department of Education and Science (DES), 1992) was not published until 1992 – following after the ‘core’ subjects and starting the reinforcement of a different hierarchy of subjects. As a consequence, art was about to slip in importance in many teachers’ minds.

In common with all of the subjects of the early National Curriculum, the material to be taught was set out in an A4 ring binder. This contained both the statutory content and non-statutory guidance to help teachers appreciate what it meant and the links that might be helpful to make in their teaching (DES, 1992). The complete library of folders meant that classroom teachers were bound to struggle to cover all the curriculum and within a short space of time there were calls for a new ‘slimmed down’ curriculum.

A revised version was published in 1995 (only three years after the first version of the art curriculum). Art continued to be defined, but there was less content and a stronger message about the importance of the core subjects (Department for Education (DfE), 1995). Many schools struggled with the core subjects, and the early Ofsted reports underlined the desirability of reconceptualizing the curriculum structure in order to give the core subjects the dominance that politicians required. The 1995 curriculum was replaced in 1999.

The so-called millennium version of the National Curriculum (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), 1999) brought together aspects of the previous versions: there was a single compendium document that presented all of the subjects, together with other aspects – including an inclusion statement and the underlying values of education. Art was now retitled ‘Art and Design’ and the importance of graphic design was made very explicit. The breadth of the subject included photography, architecture, digital media and artworks from other cultures. Seemingly in fewer words, the subject had been presented clearly for teachers.

The relentless dominance of the core subjects continued. So much so, that a counterwave arguing for the importance of creativity and the arts was led by a rare example of joined-up thinking from the (then) Department for Education and the Department for Sport, Media and Culture. The very insightful All Our Futures report (DfE, 1999) even argued that the distinction between ‘core’ and ‘foundation’ subjects was unhelpful and ought to be abandoned. This recommendation was not enacted but several other developments to further promote creativity were commissioned.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was widespread agreement that a new form of curriculum structure was needed. Two different studies were commissioned: the first, frequently known as the Cambridge Primary Review, was an independent review (Alexander, 2010), which claimed to be bigger and more thorough than the earlier Plowden Report almost forty years earlier. The second was commissioned by the government of the day and was referred to as the Rose Review. It was this that gave rise to an altogether different curriculum document in 2010 (Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), 2010). This built a structure around six areas of learning (similar but not identical to the Early Years Curriculum Framework) and unashamedly presented the contents not in subject domains but in cross-curricular groups. The ‘Expressive Arts’ section set out some simple connecting structures in the curriculum but largely left teachers to define the topics that they taught themselves. The political events of 2010 meant that although the new National Curriculum document was printed and despatched to schools, parliament failed to allow sufficient time for debating it before a general election took place. The new, incoming government decided not to adopt this version but set about defining another of its own.

In 2013, the most recent version of the Art and Design curriculum (DfE, 2013) was published. Many objected to the wording, the overly simplified statements and points of contradiction contained within it. Very little change was effected during consultation and the contents refer to materials, techniques, knowledge and skills almost interchangeably. The subject was reduced to two sides of A4 text and, sadly, many schools have failed to notice that it is impossible to achieve the aims of the subject simply by tackling each bullet point in turn. The consequence for the subject in primary schools is less than desirable. We would like to point readers in the direction of an annotated and expanded version of the DfE document, produced by the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD, 2014), which can be freely downloaded from the website. This version tries to make sure that all teachers can understand what was meant by the official one and uses a broad interpretation of the subject to do so. (There is also an accompanying glossary for those who are unfamiliar with the technical terminology of the subject.)

So, having briefly considered the historical development of the subject we know as ‘Art and Design’, we would like to turn the readers’ attention to the ways in which their understanding and execution in their classrooms will determine its success throughout the twenty-first century and beyond.

What is primary Art and Design?

As already noted, the understanding of the school subject domain is more than a little related to the subject as known, understood and experienced in the wider world context. ‘Drawing’ developed into ‘art’ then ‘Art and Design’ – but the fuller explanation that the subject should be interpreted as ‘art, craft and design’ (used by Lancaster in 1987 has only been provided in the small print of the National Curriculum since 1999). As artworks produced today may sometimes embrace concepts concerning skill, utilize non-visual forms (e.g. sound), or quickly adopt and subvert new media (e.g. 3D, drawing or printing techniques), there isn’t likely to be a simple singular definition that will cover all eventualities of the forms produced. The challenge for educators is whether our own understanding will lim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• About the Authors
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Foreword
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• How to Use this Book
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Introduction to Primary Art and Design
• 2 Current Developments in Art and Design
• 3 Art and Design as an Irresistible Activity
• 4 Art and Design as a Practical Activity
• 5 Skills to Develop in Art and Design
• 6 Children’s Ideas – Promoting Curiosity
• 7 Assessing Children in Art and Design
• 8 Practical Issues
• Afterword
• Alphabetical List of Artists Mentioned in the Text
• Useful Organizations and Resources
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright