Skip to main content

The New Zealand Curriculum - The arts

Statement of official policy relating to teaching, learning, and assessment of the arts in all English medium state and state-integrated schools in New Zealand.

<img src="/images/decorative.jpg" alt="" />

Tags

  • AudienceSchool leadersKaiakoBoards of trustees
  • Resource LanguageEnglish
  • Resource typeText/Website

About this resource

The arts is one of the learning areas in the New Zealand Curriculum, the official document that sets the direction for teaching, learning, and assessment in all English medium state and state-integrated schools in New Zealand. In the arts, students explore, refine, and communicate ideas as they connect thinking, imagination, senses, and feelings to create works and respond to the works of others.

Reviews
0

The New Zealand Curriculum - The arts

What are the arts about?

Te toi whakairo, ka ihiihi, ka wehiwehi,
ka aweawe te ao katoa.

Artistic excellence makes the world sit up in wonder. 

The arts are powerful forms of expression that recognise, value, and contribute to the unique bicultural and multicultural character of Aotearoa New Zealand, enriching the lives of all New Zealanders. The arts have their own distinct languages that use both verbal and non-verbal conventions, mediated by selected processes and technologies. Through movement, sound, and image, the arts transform people’s creative ideas into expressive works that communicate layered meanings.

Arts education explores, challenges, affirms, and celebrates unique artistic expressions of self, community, and culture. It embraces toi Māori, valuing the forms and practices of customary and contemporary Māori performing, musical, and visual arts.

Learning in, through, and about the arts stimulates creative action and response by engaging and connecting thinking, imagination, senses, and feelings. By participating in the arts, students’ personal well-being is enhanced. As students express and interpret ideas within creative, aesthetic, and technological frameworks, their confidence to take risks is increased. Specialist studies enable students to contribute their vision, abilities, and energies to arts initiatives and creative industries.

In the arts, students learn to work both independently and collaboratively to construct meanings, produce works, and respond to and value others’ contributions. They learn to use imagination to engage with unexpected outcomes and to explore multiple solutions.

Arts education values young children’s experiences and builds on these with increasing sophistication and complexity as their knowledge and skills develop. Through the use of creative and intuitive thought and action, learners in the arts are able to view their world from new perspectives. Through the development of arts literacies, students, as creators, presenters, viewers, and listeners, are able to participate in, interpret, value, and enjoy the arts throughout their lives.

Heading