Experts wanted to declutter the curriculum. Art teachers say they ripped the guts out of it

High school art students would no longer be required to learn about drawing under a draft syllabus which has been criticised by teachers for being “disappointingly reductive” and offering confused guidance about how to teach the subject.

The NSW Education Standards Authority released a new syllabus for the years 7 to 10 visual arts course for consultation last month, which removes postmodernism as a conceptual lens through which students consider artwork, while practical activities in the course such as painting have been relegated to a footnote.

Year 7 Trinity Grammar School students Max France, Kobe Manu and Kai Pham in art class. Credit: Kate Geraghty

In a letter to art teachers across the state last week, The Visual Arts and Design Educators Association of NSW criticised the proposed syllabus because it is severely lacking in clarity about what students are required to learn.

“The draft represents an erosion of the quality, depth and academic rigour that has been fostered through our current visual arts 7-10 syllabus, over the last 20 years,” it said.

In NSW, students over the course of years 7 and 8 must study visual art in high school, and they can take it as an elective subject in years 9 and 10.

The release of the draft follows the release of the “once in a generation” review of the NSW curriculum in 2020, which called for all subjects to be leaner in content in a bid to foster a more in-depth understanding of essential concepts. Politicians said decluttering would give teachers more flexibility.

The Visual Arts Association’s co-president, Nicole DeLosa, said under the proposed syllabus, teachers’ work would be made more difficult because it was less clear about exactly what they should be teaching.

“The language of the curriculum reform is about keeping essential facts and knowledge and decluttering and streamlining the concepts, but in our case, we’ve had a lot of essential content stripped out, and it has ripped the guts out of it,” she said.

DeLosa welcomed the retention of conceptual aspects of the previous syllabus, and said she was not opposed to removing the requirement that students must study drawing. However, she said more clarity around expectations was needed.

Specific detail like ceramics, oil painting and sculpture had been removed from the course outcomes, while a variety of artistic forms such as 2D, 3D and 4D artworks were only mentioned in the footnotes.

Nicole DeLosa with students at Trinity Grammar.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Karen King, an experienced visual arts teacher in Sydney’s western suburbs who was on the team which created the visual arts syllabus currently used in schools, had long called for a revision but said the proposal had removed key outcomes such as representation.

“Visual Arts is not like biology or PDHPE, with structure based on topics. The basic framework of the visual arts draft is a start, but it needs much more detailed and nuanced explanations of these areas to support teachers,” she said.

The current syllabus used in schools includes outcomes which call for students to be able to represent ideas, the conceptual strength of those ideas, and how well they are resolved. King said the removal of those outcomes made it more difficult for teachers when it came to assessing students.

“These points are very useful for teachers to be able to provide nuanced, targeted, and supportive feedback to students about their work and how they can develop it,” she said.

Other changes include increasing the minimum amount of class time spent working on making artwork from 50 per cent to 80 per cent.

A NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) spokesperson said they welcomed feedback on the draft syllabus.

“When producing draft syllabuses, NESA is informed by the current research and evidence relevant to the learning area, conducts focus group sessions, and importantly, engages classroom teachers to provide advice on content,” she said.

“The goal of reformed syllabuses is to make essential content clearer, so that teachers are better supported to know what to teach and when.”

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