Introduction to AccessArt Enquiry-Based Learning for Pupils Aged 11-14
What Is AccessArt Enquiry-Based Learning?
In line with the approach and ethos of AccessArt, the AccessArt Enquiry-Based format will provide teachers with digital resources, animations, videos and CPD which:
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Grow teachers’ understanding of why and how we teach art.
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Develop teachers’ passion for art as a subject which can so positively impact pupils’ wellbeing and potential.
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Provide clear yet flexible structures through which you can create pathways to build pupils’ skill development, knowledge, experiential understanding and behaviours.
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Help engage and motivate all young teenagers by providing content which is relevant, accessible, adaptable and exciting.
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Promote an active, open-ended, exploratory experience, placing importance on sensory skills including making, listening, talking and feeling.
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Celebrate the potential we have as human creatives and nurture an awareness of the individual’s own entitlement to creativity, resulting in the capacity to better understand our place in the world.
Why Teach Art To Teenagers?
For AccessArt, studying art is about learning through art, as well as learning about art.
For many pupils this period of their education is the last time they will study the visual arts and for these pupils building their understanding of their place in the world, which can happen through making or looking at art, is arguably more important than the art they make.
For pupils that will go on to take GCSE Art (and beyond), it is of course important that we build their practical, oracy, exploratory and visual literacy skills and through giving them the opportunity to build their understanding of the purposes of art, we help them discover what art can do for them, putting them in the best and most empowered possible place to take their creativity out into the world.
What Can Art Do For Me?
Educating young teenagers in 2023, for a life which is developing at speed with regard to digital and AI, requires us to be brave and radical in our approach.
We need to think creatively as educators about how we can enable this generation to nurture ways of being which will give them the best possible chance to understand where they fit into a newly invented world. As educators, we need to be brave and reform the way pupils learn in our schools, and we think the art curriculum is as good a place to start as any. By exploring the purpose of art, and helping pupils explore the pivotal question: “What Can Art Do For Me?” we can give pupils the skills and behaviours to not only find their place in the world, but to help further shape the world for the better, developing confidence and insight into what makes humans human.
This is why, at AccessArt, our starting point for the creation and development of the new AccessArt Enquiry-Based Pathways goes far beyond learning about art (we do that too), and instead looks further, higher, wider, deeper to explore the ways in which art helps us emerge as empathetic, compassionate, and pro-active individuals, citizens and leaders.
Meeting and Exceeding the Aims of the Current National Curriculum for Art, Craft & Design at Key Stage 3
The AccessArt Enquiry-Based Learning Pathways for pupils aged 11 to 14 take a deliberately radical shift in focus from the teaching and learning in many schools across the country. Why do we need a shift in approach? Whilst there is much excellent teaching and learning taking place in schools, it is also true to say that numbers taking Art GCSE and A level are in decline. There are many reasons for this, but we do feel that the current National Curriculum for Art, Craft & Design for KS3 could better encourage and enable teachers and pupils to really think about the relevance of art to young people today.
Our aim is to help move the pedagogical conversation forwards, lending our expertise and vision to help suggest new ways of teaching art in schools. We recognise however that teachers need to meet the needs of the current National Curriculum, until such a time as this is revisited by government, and we can assure schools that just as following the AccessArt Primary Art Curriculum enables schools to meet and exceed current curriculum guidelines, so will the AccessArt Enquiry-Based Pathways enable secondary schools to meet and exceed the current National Curriculum for Art, Craft & Design for KS3.
