KS3, Years 7, 8 & 9 Art and Design
The Art and Design curriculum in Year 7, 8 and 9 introduces students to a wide variety of artists and techniques to build their subject knowledge in preparation for Year 10 and 11. With all studied artists and designers, the department focuses on guiding students on how to use research purposefully. Students are taught particular skills that the artists have used whilst they understand the critical and contextual background to the artist’s work. Learning the “hows and whys” behind an artist’s work gives our students the relevance and purpose of the work of others and an understanding of how they can apply these ideas to their own work. Understanding the intentions of artists’ work and developing original, personal thought is at the core of our teaching as it embeds long term knowledge and skills in order to access the higher criteria in Key Stage 4 qualifications.
Units frequently begin with transcriptions of an artist’s work as lessons focus on learning the mechanics of a technique. This practice is also required of students in Key Stage 4 qualifications and we aim to teach students how to purposefully use artists and designers and develop ‘mastery’ in a specialism. The staff within the department share their creative processes as part of their teaching to demonstrate skills and to show the joys of creating art work. These methods are embedded within the lessons that we teach and, as staff, we also utilise the many mediums that the department offers such as: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, cameraless photography, Photoshop, textiles, printmaking, 3D design and many more. The use of contemporary and local art is of importance to the teaching our students so that students can access work that is relevant to them in their location and context and why they study our subject. The themes, materials and references in our learning schemes diversify between classes and staff as we differentiate by the individual nature of each group that we teach and by staff specialism. Our Key Stage 3 curriculum overview lists the themes of each unit as starting points and a suggestion of media that a member of staff may work in to develop student skills, such as in in 2D and 3D media, so that each group has the correct and deserved differentiation.
All students of all abilities can access the many different materials within the Art and Design department. Different materials have different multi-sensory qualities to them, enabling students to access content through process. There is not a singular approach when differentiating for students, their own individual needs are taken into account before differentiation is put in to place, consulting relevant support staff to create individual learning plans.
Schemes of work can be adapted by differentiating with materials enabling content to be accessed for students including: larger paper/sketchbooks, larger pens, crayons, charcoal, colour backdrops, magnifiers and many other materials to differentiate on an individual basis. Students who have a greater impairment can access the content through materials that have a more multi-sensory quality. These materials could be: plaster casting, fabric and other textures, wire, clay, stickle bricks, 3D resources like: shells, mannequins and many other multi-sensory approaches.
