Jackie King

The following podcast is brought to you by the Creative Arts Curriculum team from secondary learners educational standards directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. As we commence this podcast today, let us acknowledge the traditional custodians of all the lands on which this podcast will be played around New South Wales. Their art, storytelling, music and dance along with all First Nations People, hold the memories, the traditions, the culture and hopes of Aboriginal Australia. Let us acknowledge with honour and respect our elders, past, present and future, especially those Aboriginal people in our presence today who have and still do guide us with their wisdom.

Welcome to the Creative Cast podcast series. My name is Jackie King and I'm a Creative Arts Project Advisor with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today we're going to have a dance bonus episode where I'll be talking to some dance teachers about a recently released resource to support the teaching of the new HSC Course Prescription, Juliet and Romeo. Please welcome Julia Livingston, Rebecca Fishburn and Kirsty McCrae.
Hi ladies, thanks so much for joining us today. Can I start our podcast today by just introducing each of you and if you can tell us a little bit about the school or just tell us which school you have come from? So, Julia, can I start with you, what school do you teach at?

Julia Livingston

I teach at Camden Haven High School and it's a face to face school, but it's also a distance education centre. So, we offer dance in years 9, 10, 11 and 12 by face to face and distance education.

Jackie

Fantastic. And Rebecca, we've got Rebecca Fishburn. What school do you come from, Rebecca?

Rebecca Fishburn

I'm at Westfield Sports High School at the moment and in Fairfield West and we also run dance from 7 through 12. But just face to face, we have a comprehensive program there with lots of very keen kids.

Jackie

Fantastic. And lastly, we have Kirsty Mcrae. Kirsty, can you give us a little bit of information about your context?

Kirsty McCrae

I teach at Kincumber High School on the Central Coast and we're a comprehensive high school offering dance electives in year 9 and 10 as well as year 11 and 12 and then extracurricular activities as well.

Jackie

Awesome. We're going to start off today and talk a little bit about this resource, and it's a massive resource, that we released at the very end of last term to support our dance teachers in the teaching and learning of the new HSC course prescription Juliet and Romeo. The New South Wales Department of Education, got you guys in at the start of the year to work on this resource. And so, Julia, I was just hoping that you might be able to start us off by telling us a little bit about this resource. And I know it's going be hard to tell us a little bit about it because it is huge. But if you can give us a bit of a rundown, that would be great.

Julia

It is huge. And it's huge because of the length of the work. Once we actually looked at the work, we decided that we needed something that teachers could take into the classroom for it to be really practical, really easy for them to follow, really easy to find information. So, we spent a lot of time talking as a team as to the best approach and what we actually wanted out of this resource. And largely we came up with, we needed the overview, we need to know who's who of the cast and their relationships with each other, where that fits within the choreographic choices of Mats Ek and his background and training. So, we wanted to give a vast overview of all of the content that teachers would need in starting to even attempt to deconstruct this very long work.

Jackie

Fantastic. And I know that is one of the main reasons why Juliet and Romeo was chosen. It's obviously not the only text in the list of course prescriptions. So, Rebecca I was going to ask you why Juliet and Romeo, why is it important to have a resource like this for this particular work?

Rebecca

Well, I can't answer why it was chosen. I wasn’t privy to those conversations, but I think having a resource for the teaching of any new prescribed work is paramount. We're always talking about as teachers that we’re always time poor and there's a million things to do. And so, having a resource that you can go to familiarise yourself with the work and develop confidence to prepare lessons to start teaching the work in the classroom is really vital. And in the creation of this work, we quickly realised how potentially overwhelming teaching this work could be. And we, as Julia mentioned, we had lots of conversations about, okay, what do teachers actually need to be able to go into the classroom and feel confident because, I don't want people to be scared, but on first viewing it is an overwhelming work. It is a very long length up against another core appreciation work that is also quite long and it's 20% of our course, so having a really thorough understanding of what the work is, what its context is, what it's about before taking it into the classroom. I think with this work more than others is really paramount because you don't necessarily have the time to allow you to just put on the work in the classroom and then have those discussions in the moment. You do really, with this work, need to do a bit of the background work and what's amazing about this resource is that we have done a lot of that background work for you. So, if you engage with this resource and kind of move through it, it's our hope that you would be able to walk in and go, okay, I've got an understanding of where to start now, I know who the people are, I know how they relate and I can think about what's the best approach of my context in my classroom to just start teaching this work to my students.

Jackie

Yeah, fantastic. I know when I looked at this resource, I felt like it was a combination of both professional learning for teachers to be able to learn about this work and unpack this work, but then also a resource that provided different sort of activities that could be used by students as well. It's sort of one that could be used by teachers and students. So, Kirsty, are you able to unpack a little bit more? What's in the resource for teachers and students to be able to use?

Kirsty

There are a number of different teaching tools for teachers and students. The consensus amongst the group when we started to put the resource together was that it needed to be able to be taken into the classroom and be used rather than just be something for teachers to be using as a research tool. So, we really have worked to try and include sample options in terms of essay questions or concepts to be considered. We've worked really hard to create resources that you take into the classroom in terms of the character cards, writing tasks, discussion tasks. And then we've also pointed you in the direction of other available resources in terms of websites and access points, along with other teaching tools or teaching strategies that you can start to prioritise or individualise in terms of your own students and how they best learn and how you can best deliver the information that needs to get across to them in order to meet their outcomes for core appreciation.

Jackie

Fantastic. I'm glad that you mentioned outcomes there because my next question is about syllabus and Julia, I'm going to throw this one to you and say how is the syllabus represented or linked throughout this resource?

Julia

Well, I think the whole resource is syllabus focused because we did have the syllabus open with us at the same time as we were building this resource and obviously we couldn't touch on every single dot point within core appreciation, but we have hit a number of them. As Rebecca and Kirsty have said, this is worth 20% of our HSC grade and finding those heavy hitters that we actually need to ensure that our students understand and that we're teaching on a holistic scale directly related to those outcomes was really important for us to be able to deliver straight to the teachers and also the students through those activities. So, I think the syllabus was first and foremost at the forefront of our thoughts while we're creating this resource.

Kirsty

When we're talking about the 20%, we are talking about the whole of core appreciation with Juliet and Romeo, then counting as 10% of the overall appreciation mark. But in terms of what Julia was saying in the syllabus, what we've really tried to focus on are those bigger concepts that people tend to find a little more overwhelming like choreographic style and the thematic interpretations and those kind of concepts, we've tried to offer people starting points that they can then further build on and take into their classrooms.

Rebecca

Just extending on what Kirsty has said. I think it's important to note that because this work is based on a play, there are thematic considerations that come around that. And so, some of the wording that we have used when we've looked at organizing movement and organizing the dance is this idea of acts and scenes which interchangeable to sections. But due to the context of the subject matter of this work, when you're looking at organizing the dance and the way that it is structured rather than looking at Section one, Section two, we've got this idea of scenes happening, which links to the narrative of the work, which links to the character relationships. It's all interrelated in that way.

Jackie

Yeah, fantastic. And something I really liked was how it broke down different movements, and we were able to do that obviously by using lots of screenshots. Rebecca, could you talk about how you think this could help or a teacher using this resource might be able to help improve student outcomes in core appreciation?

Rebecca

Well, I think as we've mentioned before, this resource, while the starting point is for teachers, there are resources to take straight into the classroom. It's also about taking this and putting it in the context of the students that you have and the school that you're in. So, you're starting point for improving student outcomes is going to be very different. If I was talking to Kirsty, if I was talking to Julia, if I was talking to kids in my school. So, depending on your starting point is going to depend on how you use this tool. But the activity cards I think are a really great way to start engaging students at a range of levels to the ideas of the work. So, there's the motif cards, the theme cards, the activity cards and the character cards, and you can kind of use those as different entry points depending on the students that you are teaching. So, there's a range of approaches there in terms of verbal activities, physical activities, writing activities, reading activities. So, I think what's important to start off with is knowing your students and knowing where they're starting and choosing an entry point that's going to help them understand the work so that they can then have an entry point to improving their essay writing. Because if they don't understand what the work is, who the characters are and what the relationships are, then they're not going to be able to effectively describe an interpretation and analyse the work, which becomes evident in their essay writing.

Jackie

Kirsty, Did you want to add to that?

Kirsty

Yeah. So adding to what Rebecca said in terms of those entry points, I think with the work this size, a great starting point in this instance would be to give the kids the overview of the work, get them to already understand who the characters are, what the lay of the land is. In terms of the two acts and the different scenes and the relationships between them. Because in trying to get through this to our work, there's a lot to take on board. So, the teaching tools are there and the activity cards are there to support it, but we really do genuinely feel that it's a good starting point to give the kids a very clear understanding of what is in the work rather than going with that first impressions idea of let's watch it and then you talk to me about what you've seen and what you think is happening. I think in this case, and correct me if I'm wrong girls, but I think the first impression in this case needs to come after they've got that lay of the land and then have watched it so that they can then have and start to have informed discussions about what is being seen and what is happening and then applying your parts of your syllabus as you go through that process.

Julia

100% agree with Kirsty and Rebecca. But I think another thing about this resource and particularly those activity cards is; appreciation is often, and I'm speaking from my personal experience as well, a component which I don't feel particularly as confident in teaching and I feel that my students, they also feel that as well that it's not their strong point. So that these activity cards provide a bit more of a range of activities that they can do. It doesn't all need to be theoretical approach when we're talking about appreciation, that there are those practical activities where the students do get up and physically do movements and act like the character and so they can begin to embody it. And I feel like that, particularly with dance students, if they can embody something, then they have a far better starting point to create their own interpretation of the movement. So, I feel like that for me, going into the classroom, having those cards there is going to be so valuable as a range of teaching strategies to support my students.

Jackie

Yeah, thank you. I think for this last question, you guys have touched on this in your answers already, but I am going to ask the question anyway because I know when this was first put together, it had something like 174 pages or something like that. It was such a big piece of work which has been turned into a website which is available on our Creative arts curriculum website and all of the links for this resource and to get to our creative arts curriculum website are going to be in the show notes for you to be able to click on and directly access this resource. But I think you guys have touched on the fact that this is a two hour ballet. It can be quite an overwhelming work to be breaking down for the teachers to be breaking down and unpacking and then doing that with the students as well. If you were a teacher who hasn't looked at Juliet and Romeo yet, and you are planning on starting your work on this in term four of this year with your new year 12, how would you as a teacher or how do you imagine teachers would be able to use this resource or how should they approach using a resource like this for their preparation and also then with their students. And I think I'm up to asking Kirsty, so Kirsty, do you want a start us off with that answer?

Kirsty

I think I'd start by saying it's definitely not a one stop shop. There is still plenty of information out there to be accessed to support your teaching in this work. And it's definitely also not a step by step. You know, don't start at the top and follow it through page by page until you get to the very end. It's a resource that you do need to take a little bit of time and work through it and have a look where it fits in terms of the syllabus. I think it's important still to stay with what you're comfortable with or where you feel your strengths lie, when you start teaching a new work. So, if your strength is in watching the work in its entirety and then having a look at what that first impression is and how it fits, then continue to go with that. You do need to work through the resource and find the parts that fit within the component that you're looking at any given time. I really would just suggest that you don't work through it step by step, there is plenty to use across a number of different areas in terms of the motifs, there suggested motifs and what we've tried to do is find you examples of where they're seen so that you get it from a compositional point of view in terms of how the choreographer has used space, time, dynamics, what the relationships between the dancers or the characters are any given time. So, while it's listed as motif, it is important to still take a step back and remember that when you are teaching appreciation, that idea of those compositional aspects do come into play. And it's important that you kind of look at how the two syllabus areas can fit together in terms of teaching these new works so that you can have a little bit of a clearer understanding of how it all ties together.

Jackie

And there's lots of nodding from the crowds there, so fantastic, thank you very much. Is there anything, because I know you know this was a massive amount of work and I just want to say thank you very much for the work that you have done in putting this together, Julia, Kirsty and Rebecca. It was a huge effort. Is there anything else that you would like to add that maybe my questions have missed out on today?

Kirsty

So I will say that while the work, when you first come across it seems enormous, there is a lot to it. I think for me, just take the time to understand the characters and the plot line and then really sit down and go through the resource and see which parts of it really you think are relevant to your students and to your teaching approaches. There are parts in there that may not work for you, but there are other things that you might be able to take away and you might be able to expand on those, alter those that really suit what you're doing or enhance how you're trying to teach your students. As I said before, it's not a one stop shop, it doesn't have all of the answers. But we've tried to cover most aspects of the syllabus and we've tried to focus on those areas where in the past, in terms of core appreciation student responses, there have been weaknesses. So, we have tried to provide support and resources in those areas, to strengthen both teachers and student understanding.

Rebecca

Adding to Kirsty’s point. I completely agree with all of them, by the way. The idea of if you familiarise yourself with the characters and the plot, which Kirsty you just said, I think once we got our heads around that everything else fell into place a lot more easily. A lot of people would have already been familiar with the context of Romeo and Juliet. So, when you look at the characters, that's something familiar, but then we need to look at it in the context of the way Mats Ek has tweaked the narrative. But once you get an understanding of what is going on, then you can delve deeper in whichever way makes sense for you and your students. I think that would be my go to point.

Julia

Yeah, I would agree. I think for the first time when you're watching the work, you spend a lot of the time going, who is that and where do they fit in and what's happening now? So yeah, once you kind of have a look at those character cards and you do have an understanding of all of that, it all does make sense. And it is quite, I won't say easy work, but it's, the interpretation becomes a little bit more clear once you know the who's who. I would 100% recommend to you, have a look at those character cards, even just a glance, have them open while you're watching the work for the first time maybe, so you know who they are, what their relationship is to the other characters and that will just start to clarify things a little more.

Jackie

I think there's some great advice today about I guess approaches to teaching a core appreciation in the first place and then how to approach teaching a work like Juliet and Romeo and the size of the work. Julia, Kirstie and Rebecca, thank you. Thank you for your work on the resource and thank you for your time today to be pulling apart the resource and talking about that to give our listeners a bit more of insight into how they can use it and some of the ideas behind the work. And we look forward to hearing how people go using this resource once they start tackling the work in term four.

This podcast was brought to you by the Creative Arts Curriculum Team of Secondary Learners Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. Get involved in the conversation by joining our Statewide Staffroom through the link in the show notes or email our Creative Arts Curriculum Advisor, Cathryn Horvat at creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au. The music for this podcast was composed by Alex Manton and audio production by Jason King.

[end of transcript]

Jackie King

The following podcast is brought to you by the creative arts curriculum team from Secondary Learners Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. As we commence this podcast today, let us acknowledge the traditional custodians of all the lands on which this podcast will be played around New South Wales, their art, storytelling, music and dance along with all First Nations people, hold the memories, the traditions, the culture and hopes of Aboriginal Australia. Let us acknowledge with honour and respect our elders, past, present and future, especially those Aboriginal people in our presence today who have and still do guide us with their wisdom.

Hi and welcome to the creative cast podcast series. My name is Jackie King and I'm a Creative Arts project advisor with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today we're having a little bonus episode in which we're going to talk to creative arts curriculum officer Ravenna Gregory about one of the fantastic drama resources that we released on our New South Wales Department of Education Creative Arts website earlier this year.

Please welcome Ravenna.
Hi Ravenna, how are you?

Ravenna Gregory

I'm well thank you Jackie, thanks giving me this opportunity to unpack the resource a little bit.

Jackie

Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Last term we released so many resources, fantastic drama resources through our Creative Arts Curriculum web page and there were so many that specifically targeted stage six which were just fantastic. This included some sample scope and sequences, rationale guides and a preliminary learning sequence and unit of work. So today I just really wanted to talk some more about that unit of work, Text and Intention, which includes learning activities, assessment and resource links. Are you able to unpack that a little bit further until it's a little bit more about the unit of work?

Ravenna

Yeah, I think the focus on stage six came from, you know, the realization that year 11 is just such an important year in the drama course and an opportunity to do something different to what they would do in the HSC course. And I think a lot of teachers might approach Year 11 as sort of a carbon copy of what they're going to do in the HSC course. And whilst it's really important certainly to get them used to all those components, I guess this was an attempt to kind of look at some slightly different ways that you can prepare them for the HSC. So specifically, this Text and Intention Unit is about doing sort of things simultaneously. So obviously we're wanting students to be collaborating really effectively by the time they get into year 12 and to be having as many opportunities as possible to do that with different groups in their particular year. And I guess also the development of this resource came from an awareness that there are students who pick up drama in stage six, that they haven't done drama in stage of four and five. And so, having that awareness of practitioner approaches and how a particular approach to staging a script or creating a piece of work, which is intention, you know that idea of a directorial or a creative intention, an artistic intention, has particular conventions and creates a particular experience for an audience and creates particular dramatic meaning. So, getting them to really engage in that. What we've tried to do with this particular resource is to consistently model the task itself throughout the learning. So, the process that we asked students to go through in the final task is actually a reflection of what they're learning experiences throughout the unit of work.

Jackie

That's really cool. I really loved when I was reading this unit of work how there were sort of three elements to every single lesson with the presentation, the workshop and performance. And that really helped to model that for the students which was going to end up being their assessment task.

Ravenna

The final assessment task, Jackie, is that they actually have to do research in groups into a practitioner or a style or an approach to creating theatre or staging text that appeals to them that they are interested in. And they have to then analyse, synthesise, pare back and do a presentation for their peers about what they've learned about the characteristics of that approach. So, what makes it different to another approach, and then they have to choose a game or an activity that would help them to work with actors to achieve the artistic intention of that approach. So there's kind of this idea of the presentation and then the workshop, so the knowledge and understanding and then the application of that knowledge and understanding, and then a further application of that through a performance, using those conventions to create a particular experience for the audience. We chose to use a particular script that has no given circumstances, so there's no indication in the script of where it happens or when scenes happened, scenes can be done in a different order. There's no indication of who the characters are, no blocking. I think that could be very scary for students and acknowledging that, in this resource we give suggestions for acknowledging that and choosing instead that that's a really exciting opportunity to work with text to bring your intention to it. And that could be done with any text, depending on the needs of your community or school community. So, teachers, I would encourage teachers to use something that doesn't have too many specific details that are already dictated by the script itself. But it's it's just a lovely opportunity for students to have a lot of fun with that as well.

The nice thing, I think as well, about that structure of presentation, workshop and then performance is that the teacher models that already with three different practitioner approaches. And in this resource, we've chosen to look at Stanislavski and realism, Artaud and a total theatre or immersive theatre and then Bogart's viewpoints. But once again, there's a flexibility there that a teacher could say, “well, my students already are well aware of Stanislavski from year nine and 10, because I've had this same group come all the way through to year 11, I'm going to choose something else.” But I think they could still follow that same basic premise of the structure that the teacher presents their knowledge and understanding. The teacher runs a workshop in that style. The teacher gets the students to then use the chosen text to do a performance in that style. So, by the time they get through to making their own choices and going away and exploring and generating ideas and doing wide research there, I think they've had really great example scaffold and examples of what the expectation of them is in the final assessment, the summative assessment.

Jackie

I love that. It's really important that we are continually scaffolding for students, so that they understand what they've got to do. And I really, really love that model of presentation, workshop, performance. How does this resource address some of the outcomes and requirements of the New South Wales drama stage six syllabus?

Ravenna

The resource is designed to make sure that teachers are explicitly covering theatrical traditions and performance styles in year 11, but obviously they're engaged in all areas of the Syllabus in the group devising, the improvisation, the acting, the knowledge, and understanding that gaining of all of those practitioners. So, there's a whole lot of stuff going on in that, collaborative skills are happening. And I think hopefully by the time they get through then to year 12 they have those skills of collaboration, they understand actor audience relationship, they understand how to collaborate effectively, they have had some experience of acting, they've had some experience of critically studying and all of those things have happened through this experience. And obviously this is designed to be one term, teachers can choose how they want to use this, but if they were to use it as part of a sort of a suite of resources that we've got on the creative arts curriculum website, students are then doing group devise using research as a stimulus learning sequence and we've got one coming up, Jackie, which has a focus on individual performance and that's about specifically applying the elements of production. But naturally in the choices that they make in this resource and in their final performance, if they choose a particular practitioner who really relies on the elements of production, then they're going to be playing around with that already as well in this unit. And I guess the incorporation of Artaud’s work was a little bit as well, trying to touch on elements of production more explicitly so that there are opportunities in the learning activities for them to play around with light and shadow and sound, and the performance space, and all of those things. How is it related to the syllabus? Well, it's all the way through. It's really embedded, which is the point of the drama syllabus. Certainly, the recommendation is not that these content areas are delivered separately. They're absolutely work, they're interconnected. But specifically, the focus of this one is those theatrical traditions and performance styles.

Jackie

I really like how you talk about the elements and the styles and all of those parts of the syllabus that need to be nicely integrated in a lesson. In this unit of work, the students investigate a range of practitioners. Why do you think it is important for students to be exposed to a range of theatre practitioners as they are in this unit?

Ravenna

I mean, the preliminary course, Jackie, is all about giving students the tools that they need to make choices when they get to your 12 and to make it really informed choices. And I think the more they know about different approaches and ways of creating dramatic meaning, the more prepared they are to make the right choice for themselves when they get to both the individual project choices and to the group devising process. In year 12, I think most drama teachers will have experienced the kind of pattern of year 12 students being really influenced by the topics that they study in the first part. Most people choose to do it as the first part of the HSC course and seeing the influence of, for example, if you were to do approaches to acting and you were studying Jacques Lecoq, that we might see a lot of the influence of that in the group devised works that are created. And so, I think if in year 11 we can give students all those different tools for how to make theatre and how to manipulate an audience and manipulate dramatic meaning. That's halfway there to making them really exciting theatre makers and giving them permission as well to mix and match to create something new. That's when that innovation happens, and when they are able to show control of something is because they really understand it and then they do something new with it. And I think that can really help in the individual project as well to help students to feel safe, to take those creative risks, because they're creating things that are new for them always. And they can only do that if they kind of know what all the possibilities are and then how to play around with them,

Jackie

like filling up their toolkit.

Ravenna

Yeah, yeah, it's exactly that. So, when they reach that point in the group or the individual project where they hit a wall of, “I don't know where to go next with this”, which inevitably happens. It's “well, what about that thing that you tried in year 11 or that we looked at in year 11? Why not try that approach now?” So I think, you know, that's the main reason, I think also in the exploration of the two topics, The Australian and the studies topics in year 12, of course, it helps to have that background.

Jackie

The final question that I have about the unit of work, and you've already touched on it a little bit throughout our discussion but I want to ask it anyway, just to make it really sort of, I guess, explicit, is how do you imagine teachers are going to use this resource? They're going to go to our website and there's so much on the website that they can download. Do you imagine that they'd have to use it in its entirety? Or can they pick and choose? How do you imagine teachers using this?

Ravenna

I think the answer is yes, absolutely, I imagine them using in its entirety and linking it to their learning management systems and having that scaffolding there. But I also imagine them using this as a scaffold for their own programs and replacing all of the content, replacing the practitioners that they choose to experiment with, replacing the assessment task with one of their own, replacing the text obviously. And also, I can imagine that they could pick and choose to use one activity, but not another. And so, it's an incredibly flexible resource, but it also does, I guess a little bit in the same way as the experience for the students, it's creating the scaffolding if they need it. And also allowing for that creative freedom of using what you want, what works for you and what doesn't. And it's also, you know, just in a very concrete way, you can download it.

Jackie

Fantastic, actually, I love that some of this we put on as live content so they are able to access it whichever way they like. So just so teachers are aware, this fantastic resource that we've been talking about today is located on our Creative Arts Curriculum Website, within the New South Wales Department of Education website. And the link to the resource is going to be in our show notes. So, you'll be able to just click on that link in the show notes. And whilst it is on a New South Wales Department of Education website, it is not limited to New South Wales Department of Education teachers. Any teachers are able to access this, from any sector, even any state, even though it is answering the New South Wales syllabus documents, anyone is able to click on that resource and have a look at it and use it as at your will, which is fantastic. Thanks for sharing today, Ravenna and we have a real focus this term on stage six. So, it's really great to be able to talk about some Stage six resources. And I know you have a really exciting podcast coming up next week about supporting students in drama in stage six and the HSC. Are you able just to give us a little bit of a preview about what that podcast next week will be about?

Ravenna

Yeah, Jackie, I'm very excited about it and yet to record it at this stage we're speaking. But I'm speaking with two very experienced drama teachers from opposite ends of the state, about their approaches to the group devising process and sort of how they scaffold, and I guess for their students, how they assess the making, how they manage the formation of groups, and all those things that are super relevant right now to our drama teachers around the state. As we speak, it is week one of term two. And so, the group devising has begun for most people. And so hopefully there will be a little bit of inspiration in there for teachers when it comes out, but also probably a little bit of sharing of the joys and the challenges of the group devised performance.

Jackie

Yes, hopefully an opportunity in there to to hear about how other teachers overcome some of those challenges and maybe relieve some of the headaches that might be starting to form. I remember back when I did drama in stage six, when I was in school, and that was an extremely stressful time. Particularly that group formation element and what our drama teacher had to go through, I really did feel for him at the time. So yeah, I think it would be really great to explore some different strategies with different teachers over that.

Ravenna

I think it's a particularly exciting time for drama teachers this year because we missed the group performance so much last year. It really was noticeable, the impact of losing that beautiful creative collaborative opportunity for our students. And so, whilst yes, it is a challenging time, I think most drama teachers around the state of probably going into thinking “yes, its back.”

Jackie

Absolutely. Thanks so much for your time today, Ravenna and sharing some of those fantastic resources. And again, listeners, I hope that we are supporting some ideas for you for supporting your stage six students and please have a look at that link that is going to be in the show notes.

This podcast was brought to you by the Creative Arts Curriculum Team of Secondary Learners, Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. Get involved in the conversation by joining our Statewide Staff Room through the link in the show notes or email our Creative Arts curriculum advisor, Cathryn Horvat at creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au. The music for this podcast was composed by Alex Manton and audio production by Jason King.

[end of transcript]

Jackie King

The following podcast is brought to you by the Creative Arts Curriculum Team from Secondary Learners Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education.

As we commence this podcast today, let us acknowledge the traditional custodians of all the lands on which this podcast will be played around New South Wales. Their art, storytelling, music and dance along with all First Nations people hold the memories, the traditions, the culture and hopes of Aboriginal Australia. Let us acknowledge with honour and respect our elders, past, present and future, especially those Aboriginal people in our presence today who have and still do guide us with their wisdom.

Welcome to the Creative Cast podcast series. My name is Jackie King and I'm a Creative Arts Project Advisor with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today we are having a music bonus episode, where Alex Manton and I will discuss recently released music resources, addressing Aboriginal perspectives and histories in the music classroom.

Please welcome Alex Manton.

Hi Alex, how are you going?

Alex Manton

Hi Jackie, I’m good thanks, how are you?

Jackie

Good, good. Thanks for joining me today to have a bit of a chat about resources that we've released, some of them last year. But earlier this term we released a podcast where you spoke with Dr Thomas Feinberg and Anthony Galluzzo about Aboriginal perspectives in the music classroom. And as I was listening to that, I thought, oh, we've got some really great resources already available to teachers that address some of the things that they talked about in that podcast and I thought it's a really great time just to remind everybody what's there on our Department of Education, Creative Arts Curriculum website for people to be able to go and use and adapt for their own classroom settings. So that's what this podcast is about today, to have a bit of a chat about those resources that are there and how it addresses some of those things that were discussed in that really informative podcast that were released in week one of this term. So, do you think we should start with Stage 4?

Alex

Yeah, Jackie, I think Stage 4 is a great place to start because I know that you started with that Aboriginal program for Stage 4, and that was very much based on Aboriginal Pedagogy or the Eight Ways. And when I was helping to develop the material for Stage Five, I found that very useful to have a look at.

Jackie

So for that Stage 4 program, when I was creating that program, I really wanted to get teachers to think about their local context and connecting with their local AECG and really looking at that community links element of the eight ways or the Aboriginal Pedagogy because that is really important about connecting with the lands in which you're on and what's important to that community. I know when I was a teacher, I wasn't really encouraged to connect with my local AECG. The person who ran the programs for Aboriginal students in our school had all of the connections with the local AECG, but not necessarily all of the teachers. And I think that's really important to get out there and that's what Anthony, I think, was talking about a lot in the podcast, was that that AECG is there for us to connect what we're doing in our classrooms to the local Aboriginal community and getting in the elders and speaking about what we're doing in the classroom and connecting it to Aboriginal traditions and the culture and particularly that country and that community. And so, I felt a bit relieved as the podcast went on when Anthony was talking about, it's really important to connect with AECG because that is really what this Stage 4 program is about. It's about connecting what the traditional music, traditional Aboriginal music, but also contemporary Aboriginal music, etcetera to the local community and really connecting with that local AECG. In terms of the Aboriginal pedagogy, that is something that I've actually programmed with for a really long time. It was a requirement in our school actually, when it was first introduced was obviously called the eight ways and that those Eight Ways were considered in our programs. So, there's a lot of elements of storytelling in the program, there's a lot of non-linear thinking. So, in terms of some of the listening activities, it's not directly we're going to listen for these characteristics of Traditional Aboriginal music. In these pieces of music, there's a tally exercise where students listen in stations. So, it's that nonlinear approach to the learning. In that in terms of deconstruct/reconstruct, we listen to things as a whole or we read a Dreaming story as a whole and then we break it down into different parts and then we put it back together in a composition. So, there's lots of those elements of the Aboriginal pedagogy, or the Eight ways as some people may know it, all the way throughout the program. But the really strongest part of that program I think is the links to the community and the links to the lands that they are on. Also, I was really lucky to work with the Aboriginal Outcomes and Partnerships team in consulting on that program and writing on that program, and also the literacy and numeracy team got involved with helping me with that program as well. And there's lots of links to the learning progressions in that as well, being for Four. In terms of it being updated this term though, to support online learning I actually did turn that Aboriginal music program into a student online module. So that's more about the students investigating Aboriginal music, playing some of the contemporary Aboriginal artists songs and then also really delving into their own culture and creating a bit of a podcast about what the music of their culture looks like. So yeah, if you're stuck in online learning, that is a resource that is out there, that's going to be helpful.

Alex

That's fantastic, Jackie. And the eight ways I guess for people listening at home include community links, deconstruct/reconstruct, which you've talked about both of those and the nonlinear as well as land links, symbols and images, nonverbal, learning maps and story sharing. When I sort of reflect as a music educator on those eight ways, so much of it, it just comes naturally, we're already doing it in our teaching and we don't realize that we're doing it. And so, like you, I was really pleased to sort of say, oh no, I am covering those aspects of the pedagogy and it's just great to see that it's so intuitive, I guess, to incorporate that in our teaching.

Jackie

We might talk now about your Stage 5 Australian music program. The thing I really liked most about your Australian music program is it looks at some more of those perspectives and histories throughout the program. And definitely when you look at the music of contemporary Aboriginal artists in that program, you are getting students to look at the country that they are from and that is something that Anthony and Dr Thomas Feinberg really emphasised in their podcast, I think. Do you want to talk a little bit about that element of your program.

Alex

Yeah, definitely. So, when I was putting together this Stage five program I obviously considered music by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists as being a core component of that program really. But the content that kind of covers two things, that covers music by Aboriginal artists but it also covers that historical and cultural perspective. But it does that through a variety of different styles of music. So, there's a section in there on popular music by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists where students do get to choose an artist of their choice. There are four activities. There’s a Baker Boy performance activity, a Thelma Plum one, Miiesha one, she's a Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal artist, as well as a Yothu Yindi one, of course, in there to give students a choice between four different types of activities. Whether they want to rap like Baker Boy or play ukulele and sing like Thelma. There's an acapella version of the Miiesha song and then obviously a rock with Yothu Yindi. So, there's lots of choice there. And it's encouraging students obviously we'll learn to play one of those songs and create their own version of it and then listen to what they've done and pull it apart. But they also need to identify what land that those artists come from. And then later on in the activity it encourages students to choose their own song of a different Aboriginal artist and try to connect with them if they can using social media in some way to let that artists know that they are performing that song. And that's something that Tom Feinberg also talked about in the podcast and it's something that he does with his students. So, I did work with him in developing that part of the project and having a chat to him about ways so that students are having that connection with artists. So that's one part of the program, I guess the other part of the program, there's a section on art music there. And although it's not by an Aboriginal artist, it certainly addresses the historical cultural perspectives of our First Nations people and the colonization of Australia. And that's the work that titled The Rabbits, which actually started off as a text, a beautiful book by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, which also has gorgeous images in it as a story book. It depicts the colonization of Australia and its adverse effects it had on our First Nations people, and covers issues surrounding conflict and the stolen generation, industrialization and its effect on the environment and also the loss of Aboriginal culture in that book. That book was then later turned into an opera of all things by Kate Miller-Heidke, Australian singer and Iain Grandage. And it was performed at the Sydney Opera House I think a few years ago now. But one of the key pieces in that most popular pieces is titled The Rabbits. In the book itself, the story is told using animals. So, in the book, the marsupials are meant to represent our Aboriginal people and the rabbits represents the Europeans and the settlement and the activities in that part of the unit explore those themes and they also explore the music themselves. So, each of those characters is depicted by different styles of music as well. So, the rabbits use a very kind of operatic musical style. The marsupials use more pop kind of genre or musical theatre kind of ways of singing. And that particular unit I guess is also focused on literacy in a way as well as history. We've also got those cross-curriculum kind of ties with history and English there and I just think it sends a really important message to students in understanding that event from the perspective of Aboriginal people.

Jackie

I think too, what is really cool about that and linking, I guess back to the podcast, Anthony Galluzzo did say something about not shying away from the truth even though it might be uncomfortable. And that story definitely does not shy away from that truth even though it may be uncomfortable. I really love how that program ends with then another band who never shied away from telling the truth and that is Midnight Oil and they're Makarrata project. So, do you want to just talk a little to the exercises in that? or the activities in that part of the program?

Alex

Yeah, of course. So, for those who don't know, the Makarrata project is a Midnight Oil album that actually collaborates with 18 Aboriginal artists and it's essentially a protest album in recognition of our need to continue to work towards reconciliation through the Uluru statement. The statement is a message written to Australian people from Aboriginal Australians and it's a combination of a decade's work of Aboriginal perspectives on the Australia's constitution in our nation's history. So, there are a couple of songs there contained within that unit. One is called First Nations and one is called Gadigal Land. And students need to learn one of those two songs in small groups like rock groups and then they record their own versions and then they use their own version as a comparative analysis with the original, and then the composition activity is based on the musical features of those songs, but also encourages students to talk about something that they're passionate about. So, covering that kind of protest song type genre as well. So, it's just a fantastic project and I love that there's something in there for everyone in terms of the different artists that are performing.

Jackie

So we've talked today a little bit about the resources that we've got and what's there and what's on our website and also the podcast that you did with Dr Thomas Feinberg and Anthony Galluzzo. How do you think some of these things help students in the classroom? Obviously we know that the Aboriginal pedagogy is a great way to be teaching through culture and using all of those Aboriginal ways of learning and knowing, it doesn't just engage Aboriginal students, it engages all of our students and it's really strongly linked to the Quality Teaching Framework. So much of that links really nicely.

Alex

I think that ultimately it's really important that we're teaching Aboriginal perspectives as well as music by Aboriginal artists, not just for those aboriginal students within our classrooms, but to everyone, because it's our history, it's our culture, it's the land on which we now live for many of us who have come as immigrants, essentially, and it is everyone's responsibility. As teachers, it's our job to inform and educate about our history and our culture and there's so much to learn from it and it's so rich and it's about connecting and just understanding everyone's heritage really, and we need to keep having these conversations, we need to keep it current and we need to keep them relevant and to keep having these discussions in the classroom, even though teachers may not feel comfortable with it. I'm hoping that through what we're providing here at the department, with these resources

as an avenue to do that or as a model to do that if teachers do feel apprehensive and I kind of keep thinking of like, okay, well, so we've written all these amazing resources, but where to next? Like, what can we do now? You know, what, what could we do for stage six? Where can we take this? Can we collaborate with some Aboriginal artists further to create even more resources so that we can keep providing relevant and updated material for our teachers?

Jackie

100%. That's a watch this space, isn't it? I think for teachers and I know, you know, I've felt this too because I'm not Aboriginal, I have felt a bit of apprehension, a bit of worry, I guess that when I'm addressing Aboriginal perspectives and histories, and looking at Aboriginal music in my classroom, that I am doing it respectfully and I am doing it correctly and all of those things. So, I think for me and like the guys said in the podcast, this is everyone's business. It's not just important to Aboriginal people. It's got to be everybody's business to ensure that Aboriginal perspectives and histories and learning through culture is happening in all classrooms. And I guess having resources like this gives teachers an in for doing that. And you know, all of our resources that we create have had the Aboriginal Outcomes and Partnerships team looking at them or an Aboriginal Education and Wellbeing team have a look at it and approving it and consulting on it. And so, I guess for any teachers out there who are feeling apprehensive about where to start, perhaps our resources do give them that. This is an opportunity, it's created in consultation with Aboriginal people, it encourages more consultation with Aboriginal people and it gives you that place to start to addressing it in the classroom, because as Thomas Feinberg said, to be really improving the outcomes for Aboriginal students, they need to know that their culture is respected in the classroom and not shied away from. And I think that's a really important stepping stone.

And so wrapping up, these resources are available on our Creative Arts Curriculum Website and a link to all of them are going to be in the show notes, so you can click on that link. They are available to everyone from every sector. So, get in and have a look at them and I would say the most important thing to do is to adapt them to your community, to your school, to your students. You know, the people who are in front of you and reach out to Aboriginal people either in your school, in your community. And remembering that that AECG is there for everyone to consult with.

This podcast was brought to you by the Creative Arts Curriculum Team of Secondary Learners, Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. Get involved in the conversation by joining our statewide staffroom through the link in the show notes or email our Creative Arts Curriculum Advisor, Cathryn Horvat at creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au. The music for this podcast was composed by Alex Manton and audio production by Jason King.

[end of transcript]

Jackie King

The following podcast is brought to you by the creative arts curriculum team from secondary learners educational standards directorate of the New south Wales Department of Education. As we commence this podcast today, let us acknowledge the traditional custodians of all the lands on which this podcast will be played around New South Wales. Their art, storytelling, music and dance, along with all First Nations People hold the memories, the traditions, the culture and hopes of Aboriginal Australia. Let us acknowledge with honour and respect our elders, past, present and future, especially those Aboriginal people in our presence today who have and still do guide us with their wisdom. Welcome to the creative cast podcast series. My name is Jackie King and I'm a Creative Art project advisor with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today we've got a little bonus episode for you and I'm chatting with our creative arts curriculum officer Alex Manton, about a fantastic stage six resource that was released last term. Please welcome Alex.

Hi Alex, how are you today?

Alex Manton

I’m will. Thanks Jackie.

Jackie

Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to have a chat with us about this fantastic resource that was released last term. I'm just going to explain the resource was for Music for Small Ensembles. It's a 10-week resource package including a program resource booklet, assessment task and scores, which just sounds huge and amazing. Can you please tell us a little bit about this resource?

Alex

Yeah, sure can. So, I'm very excited about this resource because I think that our music one teachers have really appreciated having some resources for music one. And I think that this topic, which is obviously off the syllabus list, is a fantastic one to do in year 11 because of how flexible it is. That's because you can take it in any direction and choose any sort of type of small ensemble that you want to look at. And the way that this program has been structured is through a variety of different styles of music. And what I really like about it is that there are some popular music examples in there, but there's also some more diverse examples that incorporate Klezmer music, music of the 20th century with some Stravinsky, some medieval music, obviously some jazz and funk and musical theatre, and classical of course. So, it covers a bit of everything. So, there's something in there for everybody. And I think it's important to teach across a variety of genres because sometimes we can get stuck in a vacuum or as teachers, you know, we feel confident teaching the genres that we know the most about that we feel most comfortable in teaching. And this provides teachers with an opportunity to have a go at genres that they perhaps never explored because the activities and the resource booklet are very scaffolded and I encourage teachers to give it a go and find out a bit about Klezmer music or medieval music, that perhaps have never done before.

Jackie

You know what I had never heard of Klezmer music until I read this resource. Please tell us and enlighten us, what is Klezmer music?

Alex

Klezmer music is Jewish music that is typically played at celebrations. So, it's party music. It's designed to have fun basically and to be danced to. And it's an informal type of music. You know when they play, they use a small ensemble that often consists clarinet, which is very interesting, and violin and then you have like drums and bass a dulcimer or um also an accordion. And it's just such a happy music that has such a strong beat that encourages dancing and singing along. And it's very ruckus. So, it's very different to the sort of Western art music or chamber music that is perhaps more about being precise and controlled and yeah, this is party music and the kids love performing it because it's kind of, I don't know, you can't help it stomp your feet and clap your hands. So yeah definitely worth having a look at it.

Jackie

That sounds fantastic. So can you tell us how are the syllabus outcomes and requirements of the syllabus? How are they met through this resource?

Alex

Sure. But obviously we have the learning areas of composition, performance, musicology and aural and this particular program takes a very integrated approach. So, each week focuses on a different style of music and within each of those weeks all of those areas of learning are integrated. So, most lessons start with something practical, like a performance or a competition activity and then that musicology and aural learning gets drawn out of those experiences. There's also a lot of kind of games or fun activities that are physical or visual that can engage our learners. There’s kahoot quizzes and there’s clapping games. So, even though it's year 11, I think, you know, we've got to remember, they still like to have fun and they're still going to really learn a lot through those experiences. So yeah, each lesson is designed to be very interactive but still working on developing those listening skills that are so important as we work towards the HSC. So, with this content it ticks all the boxes, obviously it's looking at the concepts of music, but I always like to remember that in year 11, we need to unpack them further. We need to do that so students gain deeper knowledge of music, deeper knowledge of these musical styles, music specific metalanguage that's not just about high and low pitch or strong beat. And we want it to become more complex so that we're giving the kids that glossary or word bank to choose from when they're discussing music in the HSC. So, things like for example, in pitch, this unit goes beyond the major minor scales or even blue scales and it looks at modes. It looks at the Phrygian dominant scale and the Klezmer music. It looks at the Dorian scale in the Stravinsky work in a Soldier's Tale. So yeah, it aims to provide more complex musical understanding of different genres, which is important. Also with that, of course we've got to make sure that we're targeting our literacy. So, there's scaffolded activities and listening activities to help and support our students in unpacking how to listen to a piece of music. There's a great literacy activity in that unit, which is concept stations, where as a class you're listening to a piece of music that you've just performed and the teacher has a piece of paper for each concept around the room and each student finds one concept station and they’ve listened back to the recording that they've just done and they have to comment on that one concept and then they all switch places. So, they all get to go at adding to everybody else's ideas about that particular concept of music. And by the end of the lesson they've formed a whole analysis as a class. Of course, improvisation is also in there. There's an explicit jazz week which teaches improvisation in a very explicit way. And then obviously improvisation forms part of all composition activities as well. So that ticks that box.

Jackie

That sounds fantastic. And I love that there are so many different pedagogical strategies that you've thrown in there as well that can sort of give teachers some different ideas on how to teach a listening activity without the students just sitting and listening and writing. They're up and they're moving and sharing ideas and collaborating, which is really important as well. Fantastic. What would you say the direct outcomes for students are from this unit of work?

Alex

Yeah, I think the outcomes for students are that they are developing that deeper level of learning in all of those areas that go beyond stage five, particularly in the musicology and aural through the assessment task that's there. So, the task is based on producing a viva voce and, I think as teachers, we need to remember that in year 12 they're going to be many students that might like to do the viva component but they actually haven't really had the experience to do one yet. And so, I think that year 11s, if you haven't done one before that, it's now or never to get stuck into doing a viva and the assessment task really scaffolds that very well and gives them an opportunity to choose a question that's provided out of four questions and obviously choose a small ensemble that they're passionate about. So, I think that, yeah, the outcomes are just to develop deeper knowledge or an understanding of music in general. And I think that as a whole, that whole program really focuses on the roles of the instruments within those certain contexts, because in different styles of music the instruments do take on different roles in those sort of chamber ensembles. And it's based on how those instruments interact and the different compositional techniques. So, things like doubling and unison and call and response and imitation and interplay. That's sort of the core thing that strings the whole program together. So yeah, the outcomes of it that they're achieving that deeper understanding of music and it covers all of the syllabus outcomes.

Jackie

Beautiful. And I guess that's that really starting to prepare for all the different elements of the HSC course, given the viva voce if they choose to do that as an elective or the deepening their knowledge for the aural exam as well. Because obviously they can be thrown any kind of music at the aural exams so being able to listen to lots of different music and study lots of different music and genres through this unit is really fantastic. The last question I have is how do you imagine teachers using this resource? They will obviously go to our website and they would download the various different documents? Do they need to use the whole unit? Or what are some of the different ways you think teachers could tap into this resource and enhance what they're already doing?

Alex

Yeah. Look, the resource is designed that you could obviously do the whole unit as a whole unit. But I really think it's important that what the department has written, what we provide for you is flexible for teachers and that obviously as teachers, we are going to differentiate in our classrooms and that this resource can do that as well. So, there's lots of differentiation within the unit itself, but you don't need to do every style or genre. Pacing is going to be very different in different schools. There are some schools that are going to be able to cover twice the content compared to others just because of the particular school culture or the students themselves. So, this is very much designed to pick and choose what teachers would like to do that's going to best fit with their students and what's going to engage them, or doing all of the styles but not necessarily doing every single activity. There are some weeks where there are options for the teacher to choose from. So, there's like an option one and an option two for exactly the same lesson or week. So, it's incredibly differentiated. You know, I'd expect that teachers would download it and then change it to suit their students because that's what we should be doing really. I think that's the great thing about the department resources is that they are word documents, that you are able to edit, you are able to cut and paste rather than being PDF. And I hope that teachers can do that and just pick out the bits that that's going to suit.

And I was just going to add one more thing that I think is interesting is that in the very last lesson in that program focuses on looking at ensemble communication techniques and that is intended to be a direct link to the HSC performance marking criteria where they have to demonstrate solo or ensemble understanding. And I've always thought that students don't always quite understand what that means. And so that last lesson unpacks that through a funk fusion band. You know, what are these performers doing to communicate? And so, including things like watching and intent listening and having a unified understanding of the musical intent or what they're doing through temporal queuing, which is like feeling the beat and then queuing someone physically with your head. So, that's a bit off topic, but I just thought that was a really important thing to cover as it links into year 12 quite explicitly.

Jackie

Definitely. There’s lots of scores there too and classroom arrangements within the score booklet, is that right?

Alex

That's right. There are there are classroom arrangements as most activities start with that performance component. I think that's one thing that teachers find difficult to have the time to produce. So yes, that's all there for them.

Jackie

Fantastic Alex. Thanks so much for sharing about this resource today. The link to find the resource is going to be in the show notes. So super easy for our listeners to find. Our department website, even though it is New South Wales Department of Education, is open to all sectors. So, teachers from any area, even any state, even though obviously it's linked to our New South Wales syllabus, are able to go to the link in the show notes and have a look at this fantastic resource package. And again, I'm just going to remind everyone, it's a 10 week resource package which includes a program, a resource booklet, an assessment task and a scores booklet. So, there's lots in there that you can pick and choose from, use and adapt to suit your students. So, thank you so much for sharing with us today, Alex and we look forward to speaking to you in the coming weeks. Actually, can you, before we finish though, you've got a fantastic podcast lined up for next week. Can you please tell us about next week's podcast?

Alex

Yeah. Next week we'll be talking to Jess Van Ree, music one teacher, and Patrick Wong, music two and extension teacher at James Ruse Agricultural High School, and we're going to be unpacking the musicology and aural paper for music one and music two and hearing about the different ways that they teach those aspects of the paper to their students. So hopefully there'll be some great ideas for our teachers that comes out of that conversation.

Jackie

Fantastic. I hope our listeners really are able to get some great ideas for supporting their stage six students through to the HSC in music through these podcasts. Thank you so much Alex, have a great day.

This podcast was brought to you by the creative arts curriculum team of secondary learners, educational standards directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. Get involved in the conversation by joining our statewide staff room through the link in the show notes or email our creative arts curriculum advisor, Cathryn Horvat at creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au . The music for this podcast was composed by Alex Manton and audio production by Jason King.

[end of transcript]

Jackie King

The following podcast is brought to you by the creative arts curriculum team from secondary learners educational standards directorate of the New south Wales Department of Education. As we commence this podcast today, let us acknowledge the traditional custodians of all the lands on which this podcast will be played around New South Wales. Their art, storytelling, music and dance along with all First Nations People hold the memories, the traditions, the culture and hopes of Aboriginal Australia. Let us acknowledge with honour and respect our elders, past, present and future, especially those Aboriginal People in our presence today who have and still do guide us with their wisdom. Welcome to the creative cast podcast series. My name is Jackie King and I'm a Creative Arts project Advisor with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today we're going to have a bonus episode and the chat is going to be with visual arts advisor Kathrine Kyriacou about one of our resources that was released last year to help with assessing visual arts bodies of work, please welcome Kathrine. Hi Kathrine, how are you?

Kathrine Kyriacou

Hi, Jackie, I'm very good, thank you.

Jackie

Thank you for joining us today. I know it's a very busy time in the term for you with the HSC professional learning coming up. But today we're going to talk about the assessing visual arts body of work resource. And this was a resource that was released last year to assist teachers through Covid to mark their own bodies of work. But it is a really fantastic resource that is still available that can help teachers and students in lots of different ways. So, can you start us off today by just telling us about what the resource is and how teachers can get to it?

Kathrine

Sure, can. Yes, look, you're right. It was made in 2020 when there was a requirement for visual arts teachers to mark their own HSC bodies of work objectively. And I think for many visual arts teachers, you know, that involved quite a bit of up skilling and learning. And this was a resource that the department created to really support teachers and give them practice in marking HSC bodies of work. It is an online website and you access it by going to the stage six visual arts curriculum page and then there's a link that will launch you off onto a separate website. The website has three sections and the first section really unpacks what there is in the resource and how you might use it. There is a section that has several videos where two highly experienced visual arts teachers demonstrate a critical dialogue about bodies of work on several different bodies of work. Students might not know, but I know that most visual arts teachers do know, that's a really important part of the marking process before any mark is awarded is this critical dialogue. So, the two markers approach a body of work and they look at an artwork in terms of the material and conceptual properties and really try and unpack that in discussion. So, we have several examples of teachers doing that with bodies of work that are made in a range of mediums. And then we also have a separate section again where there are works that are just practice marking works. So, the films on the in the third section, you don't get that critical dialogue, but you do get beautiful footage of the work from a range of angles and that gives you an understanding of the work in the round or its size and scale. So, it's a really rich resource and perhaps one that people looked at last year for themselves. And I'm thrilled that we've got the opportunity to talk today about how you could use it for your students now that we're in a different phase.

Jackie

Yeah, I'm excited to unpack that a little more too because it is something that I have seen discussed, you know, about unpacking the bodies of work and unpacking the marking criteria and unpacking how the marking works. So, students have a better idea of what they need to achieve, which is a really fantastic thing, but we'll get to that a little bit later. So how does this “assessing visual arts, bodies of work”, how does it link to the syllabus or specifically to HSC requirements in visual arts?

Kathrine

The most obvious thing that people would immediately understand is that this is a resource that shows a range of bodies of work and bodies of work where students are achieving different results. They're not the kinds of work that you might see at art express, and that's really fantastic for teachers to see, and for students to see, these are students who are achieving at different levels. The work, I guess reflects all of the making objectives really. It's represents a culmination of the art making objectives. That's what the body of work is. It is an exam. The body of work is an exam that students complete and this is having a look at a range of responses to that examined. I guess, for students, this is about up skilling them in terms of understanding the requirements of the exam and also then adding the lens and the perspective that a marker might have and some of the knowledge that a marker might have by engaging with this resource. And also for students, you know, there's other ways you could use it too, it doesn't just sit for me as a resource that you can use to help students with making. There are so many ways you could use this resource to help your students in the art historical critical component. Because when you assess a body of work, you're actually interpreting an artwork. So, you're interpreting the material and conceptual qualities of the work and you're making a judgment, so you're backing up your claims with evidence directly from the work. And definitely in section one of the visual arts HSC exam, when students are looking at a range of unseen source materials, they're doing exactly that they're looking at artworks they haven't seen before. They are asked to analyse the qualities of those works to inter relate their knowledge of the frames, the conceptual framework and practice in order to interpret those works effectively and to make judgments about those works and that's what this does. I think also just to go one step further, I'm probably overstepping your next question, but look language as well, when you hear the two quite experienced markers and I will say they are Rebecca O’Donoghue and Jennifer Tislovich. When you hear both of those amazing teachers unpack the artworks, you are hearing a really rich, expressive, specific visual arts meta language and there's so many ways that teachers could use that. I mean just getting students to add to their vocabulary lists by listening to all of the different descriptive interpretive words that those two markers make would be really worthwhile.

Jackie

They really are in depth conversations. I feel like I got almost a whole art lesson as I was watching the videos because they're talking about the various genres and the different types of art and I think that's really fantastic too. There's examples for all of the different ranges of marks, but also so many different mediums as well being shown. So, it really gives students a really fantastic well body of work to look at.

Kathrine

No, it does. There's diverse mediums there and there's some examples of quite innovative practice, and then there's examples of quite traditional or established practice. And also there are examples where you would hope that students can see, you know, an achievement that is accessible and then maybe put on their critical hat and, you know, there's a beautiful range of activities you could do with this, and think how would they feed forward to this student, therefore they're going to also think of how can I feed forward to myself? You know, if I was to look at my own work now, it's always easy to give other people feedback. We both know that it's much more challenging to give yourself feedback, I think by getting classes to start or students to start by engaging with other students’ works and objectively thinking about where that might sit, compared to the marking guidelines that are publicly available on the NESA website, and then to look at their own work, you're starting to give them actually the insider knowledge that they need to lift or to help themselves on that journey towards better achievement, I guess.

Jackie

So just on that, my next question is actually how will students or how will this improve outcomes for students? So, do you want to unpack that just a little bit further?

Kathrine

Yeah. Look, I think there's several different ways. First of all, students, in order to be able to give their best, students need to understand the process of marking bodies of work and for quite a long time, this hasn't been knowledge that has been very, very readily available or accessible and it is now, and I think teachers need to make the most of that. It shouldn't be precious private knowledge that only teachers understand. If you want your students to do well, you need to up skill them or, to use the language of academic Wayne Sawyer, you need to ensure that they also are assessment insiders, they have the knowledge, skills and understanding or some of the knowledge, skills and understanding, that you have so that they are able to make objective judgments about their work. So, I've spoken about the fact that it might help students with a critical dialogue that might help them with their building a visual arts meta language. It certainly would help them to understand the exam marking guidelines and the different bands for marking bodies of work. I also think it will help them to clearly see that there is no one answer for how you respond to the problem of creating a body of work, that there are multiple pathways to do that and hopefully will help them see that body of work inter relates your conceptual practice, so your ideas and your intentions, and then also your material practice your skills and techniques and methodology that you might use to create the work. So, look, there's so many ways.

Jackie

Yeah, that's fantastic. And I even loved that idea of just adding to their word banks or their vocabulary lists about using different words to describe an artwork, because that's obviously what they need to do in the exam as well.

Kathrine

Yes, and go beyond description really, and that's the beauty of this too. We actually want to move them beyond, so we want them to have all the layered rich words that they need to describe, and then we want them to move as the markers do when you watch these videos into interpretation and to really make connections and to start to think, you know, things aren't arbitrarily placed on a canvas, the artist has put things there for a reason. And as the audience interacts with the work, they start to unpack these the layers of meaning. And it's really, you know, it could be quite an effective moment for students to look and go, gee, you know, well, the layers of meaning in this work a far more obvious. It doesn't take me anywhere. It's very, you know, it is what it is and then it shuts down. But actually, when we looked at this other work, that might be a stronger work, there's a lot more we can unpack and we can connect it to the practice of an artist that we studied last year and we can see that there are codes and signs and symbols and choices that the student is made to get us to make more sophisticated and informed connections. So, and for students to start to see that. Well then they also, we hope, start to then think of ways to apply that to their own work.

Jackie

In the statewide staff room, you put up a bit of a lesson recently for how teachers might be able to use this resource. And I know there are so many different ways that teachers could use this resource. Could you share with us some ideas on how you think teachers, even though this was created to help them be able to mark their own bodies of work last year. How could teachers now take this resource and use it as a classroom tool?

Kathrine

Sure, yeah, I can. And we're actually going to put some of these ideas on the website link from our curriculum page too. And look, I'll give you a couple of quick ideas, but they're not, there's so many different ways you could use it. As I've already said, you really could build up vocabulary using these. I think if you were to give your students the body of work marking guidelines from NESA and you familiarized them with the language of those. One of the ideas that I had put on the statewide staffroom page was actually don't give them the marking guidelines as they are just printed straight off from NESA. Even at that point, give them something that's jumbled up, give them the marks, you know, in one column and all the different descriptors all mixed up and ask your students to really look at the differences in the language and you know, that could be a very simple three or four minute activity at the start of a lesson, put the marking guidelines back together so that you've actually engaged with what they say and the differences in the terms and the meanings under each of the bands. I had said that you might show a class a video and the critical discussion that you might stop that video at a certain point and ask the students to use the marking guidelines and to give that work a mark, even to talk with the person beside them so that they're having a critical dialogue. Maybe they write some notes down about their interpretation of that work, where they justify that mark, then sharing that with a class could be really engaging lesson. And certainly, you will get to see how the kinds of value judgments that your students are making and whether they're able to link some of those value judgements back to evidence that's actually in the artwork, which are again, the kinds of things you also want them to do in an HSC written exam, interestingly, very, very similar skills. So, you're covering a couple of bases here by working in this space. I think certainly you could set up your class in little practice marking teams and let them have a go of being the ones who go around and look at works and argue for a mark for each work. And you could share those. I think you also could really build up your students understanding of material and conceptual practice and the frames and the conceptual framework as you support them to have a critical dialogue about those works. Look, there's lots of different ways. I've probably said, some of the most obvious which is to get them to actually act as markers. I'd love to hear if people are using them in any other ways. We haven't had this kind of resource before available to visual arts teachers and it's really exciting to have something that supports both growth in your own students and their understanding of the demands of the HSC and of assessment practices, and of language and marking criteria or bands. And then also, you know, you can still of course use this privately to lift your own knowledge and understanding of marking. So it's a pretty unusual resource and I'm really excited by it really. Yeah, I'm excited it can live outside of Covid, so that's good.

Jackie

Yeah, that's fantastic. I was going to say, I think it's as you said, for them to be was Assessment Insiders. Yeah. So they really understand what it is the markers are looking for and for teachers and students to really understand that I think is a really important thing.

Kathrine

Yeah. And look, it really is worth, for the teachers that are listening, they will, they may not know Rebecca and Jennifer, they may heard of Ron and I do need to give Ron Pratt from Wyndham College some credit because he worked with us on this and he is so experienced in marking bodies of work and in this space. So, there is a little introductory clip by him which really was set up to give teachers guidelines during the 2020 marking process. But there are so many valuable tips in that and I would encourage teachers to go back and revisit some of the some of the advice that he passes on.

Jackie

I'm sure 2020 is a year most people would like to forget, but it is really nice to talk about some of the positives that have come out of that. And because this resource now exists, because teachers had to mark their own works, there's now so many different ways and ways that will benefit you in the classroom as teachers and also your students.

Kathrine

Absolutely.

Jackie

I do want to mention that there's going to be a link for the resource, a direct link for the resource in the show notes that is available to teachers of all sectors. Please have a look at the show notes, and click on the link and go and have a look at the resource and you can, I'm sure you can come up with ways beyond that we've talked about today to use it in your classroom. And if you are a New South Wales Department of Education teacher it would be great to hear in the statewide staff room how you are using this resource. Kathy, you have a really fantastic podcast coming up next week where we unpack some of the HSC professional learning that you run. And we look at some of those strategies across the creative arts. So, can you tell us a little bit about the podcast that we've got coming up next week?

Kathrine

Yeah, I'm really excited about that, Jackie because we've had lots of queries from teachers about HSC professional learning and it is visual arts as the creative arts subject that's been involved in the last year and a half. Although, you know, that may change in the future and others might come on. The nice thing about the podcast is we do talk about a couple of the strategies that really successful HSC teachers use across New South Wales and those strategies are unpacked in relation to visual arts and music and drama. And look, it's just really lovely to hear about how a teacher in one classroom can be using a strategy really effectively with their own content and their own students. And that strategy also can work in another classroom equally effectively. So, it was really interesting to hear from our drama and music creative arts officers about their experiences. So, I hope people do tune into that. It's a little insider knowledge if you haven't done the professional learning as to what we're doing in that space.

Jackie

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that one as well. Thank you so much for your time today Kathrine, for unpacking the resource and giving some ideas of how we can use this fantastic resource that was created for Covid but using it post Covid to improve outcomes for students and also using like having another classroom resource that you can tap into. I think it's fantastic.

Kathrine

Thank you so much, Jackie. And again, look, thanks to the wonderful teachers who supported the making of that resource as well. Very grateful.

Jackie

This podcast was brought to you by the creative arts curriculum team of secondary learners, Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. Get involved in the conversation by joining our statewide staff room through the link in the show notes or email at Creative Arts curriculum advisor, Cathryn Horvat at creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au. The music for this podcast was composed by Alex Manton and audio production by Jason King.

[end of transcript]

Jackie King

The following podcast is brought to you by the creative arts curriculum team from secondary learners, educational standards directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. As we commence this podcast today, let us acknowledge the traditional custodians of all the lands on which this podcast will be played around New South Wales. Their art, storytelling, music and dance, along with all First Nations People, hold the memories, the traditions, the culture and hopes of Aboriginal Australia. Let us acknowledge with honour and respect our elders, past, present and future, especially those Aboriginal people in our presence today who have and still do guide us with their wisdom.

Welcome to the creative cast podcast series. My name is Jackie King and I'm a Creative Arts Project Advisor with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today we're going to have a bonus episode. We're going to talk about a visual arts resource that has been released recently with Alex Papasavvas. Please welcome Alex.

Alex Papasavvas

Hi Jackie, thanks for having me on.

Jackie

Thanks for coming on the podcast today, Alex. So, we've released some pretty cool resources recently. Part of this was released last year and then some of it was released last term as well. We've released some support resources for visual arts for the frames, practice and conceptual framework and I know that they're different resources for stage four and five and then for stage six. So, I was just hoping that you might be able to start us off today by telling us a little bit more about these resources that are available on our website.

Alex

Yeah, sure. So, on the Stage Six website we've got some support resources that are really intended for classroom use and they unpack the core concepts in visual arts of practice, the conceptual framework and the frames. And then on the Stage four and five website we've got a support document for teachers that we put out last term, which is more about the frames but does touch pretty heavily on conceptual framework as well. So, this is the way that content is organized in visual arts. And these ideas are really central to the way that we teach visual arts in New South Wales and provide a quite a robust framework from which to understand both art making and critical and historical studies. So, these ideas of practice, the conceptual framework and frames are shared all the way through what I call the visual arts family of subjects. So you'll find this content of practice, conceptual framework and the frames all the way through the 7-10 Syllabus is for visual arts, photographic and digital media and visual design and in stage six visual arts and then with some minor variations in the Stage Six content endorse courses for photography, video and digital imaging, visual design and ceramics. So, the resources themselves are pretty flexible because they describe and support the teaching of these concepts that are central throughout all of these subjects. Now, the resources themselves. On the Stage six website, there are three scaffolds that were put up last year. They're quite condensed and only take up one or two pages each and they're in the form of some questions that support teaching and learning in each of those areas. So, for practice, this one's split up into art making and critical historical studies because it can be really helpful to consider practices of makers and writers separately sometimes and also to unpack what sometimes of subtle delineation between historians and art critics. So, to give an example of what's in this resource, there are questions here for practicing art making that includes things like what are the artist's intentions? What conceptual choices has the artist made? How has the choices of materials and techniques informed the representation of ideas? So, these are really useful for either teachers or students to get into what practicing art making actually looks like. And looking at some of those big ideas of intentions, choices and actions in both art making and writing. The scaffold for the conceptual framework is similar. It's framed as a set of questions for classroom application that support understanding of what we call the agencies of the art world, which are these big concepts of artwork, artist, audience and world. So, in this resource, there are four or five questions for each of those agencies that could be really helpful for teachers or students to organize their thinking around these concepts. So, for example, for audience, one of the questions is, who was the intended audience for the work? Has this changed over time? And that opens up some really big possibilities for a discussion or a line of inquiry about a particular artwork. And I also know that a question like that doesn't just consider audience in isolation. It also references the artwork itself. So, it's a good example of a relationship between audience and artwork and considering those relationships within the conceptual framework, a really rich source of meaning and understanding in visual arts. So finally, the frames scaffold, as you'd expect, has four or five questions to support understanding in each of the frames, the frames really are a tool that we use to consider understanding and art from a particular perspective. We use subjective cultural, structural and postmodern. So, these are like the big themes or big ideas that we can think about art from. And really the frames are meant to sit around the ideas of understanding that you can get from thinking about practice, or the relationships between artwork artist audience and world. Certainly, by the HSC, we're expecting students to bring their understanding of these three areas of content together in a holistic manner.

So, a question from the scaffold, that applies the perspective of the postmodern frame, like how is the artist challenging or questioning long held beliefs, traditions or conventions, contains that idea of challenge that's really central in the postmodern frame, but it also references the relationship between the artist and the world from the conceptual framework and that directive of how we also bring in ideas about artists practice of what they do when they're making artworks and what's motivated them to do. So, not to be too repetitive, but the document we have on the Stage four and five website, it's called programming for the frames. This is more of a support resource for teachers to inform their programming. So, like a set of ideas that teachers might use to focus on a particular aspect of content, or used to develop a line of inquiry in a unit of work. So, in this resource for each frame there's three sections, there's firstly an overview of how that frame intersects with the conceptual framework. So how, for example, in the subjective frame artists, artworks, audiences and the world are all thought of in terms of things like individual and personal experiences, feelings, memories, the imagination, fantasy and so on. So, there are some examples there of like in the subjective frame, artists have thought of like this and goes on to clarify the way that those concepts interact with each other. Each frame has a glossary for some of the big ideas associated with that frame. So again, for the subjective frame, we've got definitions or explanations of things like emotion, memory, sensory experiences. And then for each frame there are some questions that could be used as stimulus in the classroom. Like what clue does the title of the artwork give about its intended meaning? Or how might audiences make a personal connection to this artwork? So, this document, programming for the frames is really a support document or a tool for teachers to get ideas for how to approach that area of content in their programming.

Jackie

Fantastic, massive resources. Well, they sound like massive and really comprehensive resources that really help both students and teachers. And obviously they're about unpacking the core content in your syllabus. So, my next question, always in these podcasts, is how does this resource support the syllabus? Or how is the syllabus evident in these resources? Are you able to unpack that a little bit more for us?

Alex

And you know, I've probably made these sounds a bit bigger than they are. I mean the scaffolds for stage six, they’re only one or two pages each, so they're quite condensed.

Both of these resources, they’re for teachers and students to engage directly with that language of the syllabus itself. So, they're basically like syllabus references. We've been using these concepts in art education in New South Wales for a really long time, about 20 years, and I think most our teachers in this state would agree that it's a really excellent way to organize content for this subject. There's an incredible flexibility here. You can take these ideas of practice, frames, conceptual framework and apply them to any artwork, any artist or critical writing or exhibition or whatever aspect of the art world you're looking at and use those ideas to generate and arrive at a really deep, robust, nuanced understanding of art. It scales really well. So, you can selectively apply these ideas across years 7-12 and be able to ask any student well in this artist practice, what were their intentions, what choices did they make to create an artwork and then maybe go a bit deeper with things like, well, how might an audience reacted to this? Or have they represented aspects of their cultural background and in that way lead students who are more advanced or nuanced understanding or interpretation over work?

Jackie

Yes. Really helping to build that terminology, I guess, through 7-12 and making it more complex as it moves through the stages of learning. How, and I guess we've just sort of answered this but, how can that help to improve outcomes for students?

Alex

Yeah. I think that having resources like this that make the syllabus language really explicit and clear is incredibly helpful. I think a lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive, like you might have students look at an Aboriginal artwork or something that's really obvious from China or Japan and they know that there are ideas about culture embedded in works like this, right? But having that framing language of saying, okay, well, we can use this as a tool to organize our ideas and explain how or why that culture is represented in that artwork or how the artist has related to the world, to develop that understanding or what particular meaning or history. Some of those symbols might have been able to organize their thinking and recognize how this actually is exactly what the syllabus is asking for. I think that can be really helpful, and particularly in the senior years where we might expect students to have a bit more of that meta understanding of the fact that they're taking an HSC course and that it has a syllabus and it has outcomes and it asks for particular things and so having documents like this that organise those ideas that might already be familiar in a way that's very explicit and say when we're thinking about practice this is it, or when we're thinking, you know, when we're using perspective from one of the frames, these are the kind of questions that we can be asking ourselves to unpack meaning from an artwork or about an artist practice. But I think they're developing that understanding in those ways of thinking through the junior years is obviously really critical as well. And having those names to give these concepts is important too. Yeah.

Jackie

And obviously in the Junior Resource, in the Stage 4/5 programming for the frames, you're showing how some of those different frameworks link up, is that right?

Alex

Yeah, that's right. So actually, when in developing this resource, I was thinking about an older document that used to circulate a bit, which was fantastic titled Practice, frames, conceptual framework. But one of the things that was really helpful from that resource were these tables that said, hey, so in the subjective frame, we think about artists artwork world audience in these ways. This is spelled out in the syllabus, but having that organization of being very specific and saying from this perspective, we're thinking about these agencies in this way, it was really useful. And then having a section that looks at relationships between agencies in the conceptual frameworks. What does an artist world relationship look like? Or what meaning can we discover when we think about how artworks and audiences interact with each other. So those relationships are really important as well. So, in the stage four and five resource, it is more for teachers, they would have to be a little bit more selective about how to pull parts of that out for use in their classes. I mean there are questions there, there are definitions, there are explanations of the syllabus content. You probably wouldn't want to show the whole thing to a year seven or eight kid, but you could use some of the ideas and some of the questions in that document to for example, set up a line of inquiry for a unit, to set a question for a lesson or for an assessment task or something like that. And also having some definitions for some of the big concepts in each of the frames can be a helpful thing in the classrooms. So say for the structural frame, there are some different definitions here for what is visual language or what do we mean when we're talking about composition or subject matter or aesthetics? And so having some of those terms explained in a support document I think can be really helpful for people to go looking for when they need ideas or language in their programming.

Jackie

Yeah, and I think that is really important too, obviously you were just saying you know, the Visual Arts syllabus is 20 years old. Like these concepts have been around for a long time and most visual art teachers should understand these, but I think it's really important too that we're thinking about our colleagues who may be teaching outside of their subject area, like a music teacher might be teaching some visual arts in stage four etcetera. And I think this, that Stage four and five resource document, really does help to unpack some of those concepts. And I think it's really important to show how they are interrelated because nothing really has to live in a vacuum.

Alex

That’s a very old that's a very old saying in art education that art doesn't occur in a vacuum, but programming can't really occur in a vacuum either. Right. And I think that this resource is, you know, as a quick reference, it might be a little bit easier for someone to navigate than the syllabus itself, even though it's come pretty much directly from the ideas that are in the syllabus.

Jackie

Yeah, fantastic. So obviously there's two different resources that we're talking about here. We're talking about a Stage four and five support document that's really for teachers to inform their programming. And then we've got the scaffolds which are for stage six, primarily unpacking the frames, so teachers can obviously use those documents in different ways. Just wondering if it's beneficial if we talk about how teachers could use the first document and then how they could use the second resource as well. So, could you unpack for us how teachers might be able to use the stage four and five programming for the frames document?

Alex

So the programming for the frames document, I think would be a good thing to look at when you're writing a unit of work in stage 4 and 5. You could use it for stage six as well really, I mean the ideas from practice frames conceptual framework, they all scale incredibly like you can apply those ideas across learning from 7 to 12, but if you needed something for, say an assessment task, like if you need it, if you were setting an exam for year 10, if your school does year 10 exams, you might go to that resource to look for questions that relate to the unit of work that you've done or when you're writing the unit in the first place, you might look to, you know, like how might we consider this artist in the way that they relate to the world around them or like are we coming from a cultural frame perspective or a structural frame perspective? What kind of language can I use in my program, in my lessons, in my resources to support that understanding from a particular viewpoint, you know? And it's sort of like a convention that we try to limit our use of the frames to like one or two at a time. Otherwise it's a lot. So being able to go to a support document like this to look for some more specific ideas I think could be really helpful in planning and programming, in setting lessons worksheets, like assessment task activities, all of that sort of stuff.

Jackie

Yeah. Fantastic. And the Stage six resource are more scaffolds for students with some questions and I know you're creating a Stage six case study at the moment, which refer to those scaffolds all the way throughout, which is really nice. Can you talk a little bit about how as you've created your stage six case study, how you've been able to use those scaffolds for teachers to be able to refer to for their classes?

Alex

Sure. Well we often say not to reinvent the wheel, right. And the scaffolds there are quite, you know, they concentrated goodness in terms of resource for programming. So, I really see this is something that in your Stage six class, this might be something that students have in their books, are in their diaries as a reference at all times. So, when they are considering an artist study or a piece of writing, they can go back to those scaffolds themselves to figure out meaning. To be like, all right, so my teacher has said we're looking at the cultural frame today, so what am I going to do? And then there are those questions there that help them to understand, well, actually this is what is being asked of them. So, this is one that's been designed really to be used by students in that way. It can be used by teachers quite easily as well to set questions to drive a classroom discussion and to develop resources and activities. But this is something that's accessible at that student level. And I think with some teacher moderation, you know, that could be used in stage five as well or used very selectively in stage four if you wanted to. And I know that some of the resources we've already published for stage five in that ctrl + alt + shift set of resources does reference these scaffolds directly and says, hey, like we're thinking about the cultural frame this time, so go to the frames scaffold and answer some of the questions from the cultural frame. The case study that's in development does have that throughout as well. So, this is something that could be used as is directly by students or to have particular parts pulled out and focused on by the teacher.

Jackie

Fantastic. They sound like really fantastic support documents for teachers and students to really start understanding the terminology of the frames, practice and conceptual framework and yeah, helping to answer some of those questions or posing some questions to be answered. Thanks for sharing about those resources today, Alex and of course we do need to just remind teachers that those resources are available on the Department of Education's curriculum website and there is a link to both of those resources in the show notes. So, you can click on that link in the show notes to access them.

You have a pretty exciting podcast coming up next week where you're talking to some pretty amazing art teachers. Can you please tell us a little bit about what that podcast or what we can expect from that podcast next week?

Jackie

Yeah, so this podcast is mainly about case studies in the HSC course. Case studies are huge and as you know, the expectation is that we cover five different case studies in the HSC course specifically. And for me, as a classroom teacher, this was a very exciting time for me, like writing a case study. Maybe I'm just a huge nerd, but I really enjoyed devising those case studies, like grouping some artists together that had something in common and setting up a particular theme or a critical question or a line of inquiry and following that through for, you know, for a bit of a deeper look. So, I'm interviewing two very experienced visual art teachers Brian Shand and Melanie Cassin and they're going to be sharing some of their ideas about case studies and their approach to programming for Critical and Historical Studies in stage six and I'm very excited about it.

Jackie

That sounds really exciting and I'm looking forward to hearing some of those ideas. I think it's really great for teachers to hear the ideas of other teachers and what's happening in other people's classrooms. Fantastic looking forward to that one. Thank you so much for your time today Alex to share about some of those resources. And we look forward to hearing the case studies podcast next week.

Alex

Yeah. Thanks Jackie.

Jackie

This podcast was brought to you by the creative arts curriculum team of secondary learners, educational standards directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. Get involved in the conversation by joining our statewide staff room through the link in the show notes or email our Creative Arts Curriculum Advisor, Cathryn Horvat at creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au. The music for this podcast was composed by Alex Manton and audio production by Jason King.

[end of transcript]

Jackie King

The following podcast is brought to you by the Creative Arts Curriculum Team from Secondary Learners, Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education.

As we commence this podcast today, let us acknowledge the traditional custodians of all the lands on which this podcast will be played around New South Wales. Their art, storytelling, music and dance, along with all First Nations People, hold the memories, the traditions, the culture and hopes of Aboriginal Australia. Let us acknowledge with honour and respect our elders, past, present and future, especially those Aboriginal people in our presence today who have and still do guide us with their wisdom.

Welcome to the Creative Cast podcast series. My name is Jackie King and I'm a Creative Arts Project Advisor with the new south Wales Department of Education. Today we're going to have a visual arts bonus episode and I'm joined by our Creative Arts Curriculum Officer Alex Papasavvas to talk about a visual arts case study that was released early this term. So please welcome Alex.

We interrupt this podcast for a very special announcement. The Creative Arts Curriculum Team announce our Creative Casting Call. This initiative provides two exciting ways that you and your students can get involved in our podcasts and earn some much needed funds for your creative arts faculty budget. First, compose our podcast music. Compose some music we could use for the intro and outro for our podcast next term. The best composition will be used in our podcast next term and win your school a $2,000 grant for creative arts. The second is design next term's promotional tile. Our podcast theme for next term is where to from here.

The best tile will be used for our ‘where to from here’ podcasts next term and also win your school a $2,000 grant for creative arts. Find the full brief in the Creative Arts Statewide Staff Room. Entries for next term close on the last day of term three with the winning composition and tile to be featured and credited in term four’s podcasts. This initiative is only available to New South Wales Department of Education schools 2021.

So at the start of this term we released a visual arts case study for year 12. So can you tell us a little bit about the case study?

Alex Papasavvas

So in this case study there is a lot of Aboriginal content. So, I do just want to take a very brief moment to acknowledge that I'm here on Aboriginal land and pay my respect to Elders past, present and emerging. I'm also going to use the term Aboriginal throughout this. That's a term that's used in the resource and is the one that we tend to use a lot in New South Wales in the education space. So, this is a pretty big resource. It's a case study that picks up the thread in Australian art history and just follows it. The point at which we pick up this thread and start following it is in the 1920s with the Australian artist Margaret Preston and I think I might just take it from there and explain the big ideas and the story that this case study really follows. So, to set the scene a little bit for Margaret Preston, we begin following some of her artworks, ideas and writing in the 1920s. At this stage, she's around 50 years old. She's already spent some time before World War I, traveling in Europe and experiencing and participating in the art scene there, including in Paris, which was sort of still the centre of the art world at that time and really dominated by these big new ideas about modernism. So there are some big name post impressionist artists here like Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse. She's viewing and experiencing their work and participating in this art scene. She comes home and starts to think about what Australian modernism might look like and she decides that there's this huge untapped potential in Aboriginal art and starts looking at influence her own practice. So, we can situate this in this prevailing trend in modernism that we now call primitivism.

And there's some really well known examples of this in practices of artists like Gauguin and Picasso who are already in the process of exploring themes and motifs from various indigenous peoples in French colonies, in Africa and the pacific. So to take the example of Picasso in developing his cubist aesthetic. One thing that he does is visit museums and look at artefacts like masks and we can track this mask influence for a lot of his major works including Les Demoiselles d'Avignon often held up as this river watershed moment in European art history, very influential in this progression through modernism towards abstraction. A great example of this like flavour of European modernism where these men that we now call the great artists of the early 20th century studying new movements and new aesthetics, but following this very colonial mindset of taking material from indigenous peoples and using that in their own practice. So that's what primitivism is. And this is something that Margaret Preston starts exploring pretty earnestly in the 1920s. So, she's come back to Australia. She has established herself in the art scene. She's got friends in the major art journals and in the museums and she starts doing her own versions of these primitivist investigations into some of the Aboriginal artefacts that she's able to find. And I think she starts at the Australian Museum in Sydney and then starts branching out from there. So, she starts looking at the kind of artefacts that had already been collected by the museum and put on display and held in the collection there and the kind of artefacts of things like shields that have been carved decorated, painted, carved trees and other cultural and ceremonial artefacts that have been taken and taken to the museum basically.

So, Margaret Preston starts looking at some of these artefacts and she's looking at them with this eye of a visual artist designer to try and look at what are the visual qualities of these artefacts that I can appropriate to borrow to take and use in my own work. She has a strong motivation for doing this. She wants to develop an Australian version of modernism. She wants like to explore the Australian national identity through her art making and she thinks the best place to do this is from our own Indigenous peoples as other European artists have done over there. We can do the same thing here and get this Australian style of modernism going. So, what she does is basically, I guess almost copy. Like she would look at a shield and then do her own small painting, a bit of art making with that design. And what she does with these works is not just exhibit them in galleries, but she starts writing for this journal Art in Australia accompanied by these images to say, hey, we've got all this untapped potential here. If you're an artist, if you're a designer, look at this stuff and use it in your own art making because that's how we're going to get an Australian style happening. It's a little bit like nationalism. Like there are a lot of artists and writers in the 1920s who were thinking, what is our Australian national identity? Australia's only been a federation for about 20 years at this point, there's this trend across academia and other intellectual circles to be like, what's it going to look like here in Australia? So, this becomes a big part of Margaret Preston's practices and artists. Now she's developing her own major artworks which are often based on landscapes or compositions involving flowers. She's really well known for these, but they start to be really influenced by the, the kind of Aboriginal artefacts that she's been looking at. And sometimes this is like abstract parts of the design. Like she might look at a tree carving with a very geometric kind of V shaped and then we see some of those shapes come back in her works. She starts thinking about colour that's influenced by things like ochre paintings by other bark paintings that she's looked at. If you look at her body of work over her entire career, there are some works that are really, really obvious, like she's painted an Aboriginal myth with recognizable Aboriginal figures. So, I say painting a lot of these works are actually prints. She was well known as a printmaker. She did some painting as well, but there are also a lot of her works where the influence is a little bit more subtle and you might see things like, she's made a print of a landscape, but she's used a lot of these sort of ochre colours to populate that landscape.

Printmaking was a big thing for her and she wrote a number of articles over quite a few years. There's a big one from 1925 referenceing this resource, there's another one from 1930 and she's really trying to get other artists and designers to take this influence from the world of Aboriginal artefacts in making their own art and design works. The way the story unfolds is that it's a slow influence, but it does end up being a strong influence. So, by the 1930s and 1940s, there's another big publication out of the Australian Museum, which is a book of photographs of Aboriginal artefacts, you know, and there also is someone that Margaret Preston was working with when she would do these museum dives. And this book just contains like hundreds of images of these artefacts, things like shields and paintings. And so eventually as this book gets published, and within this context of Margaret Preston really pushing and saying, hey, let's use Aboriginal art in our own designs. People do start doing it. And so, you start to get this phenomenon through the first half of the 20th century, in Australia. Where these influences of art and design from Aboriginal artefacts do start to seep into Australian art and design more generally.

Jackie

That sounds really interesting Alex, how she's trying to create an Australian style through using these Aboriginal artefacts. So, the title of the case study is called Conversations and Appropriation in the Art World. You've talked a bit about that appropriation and where that started. Can you explain to us then the conversation is part of the case study and where that takes us?

Alex

Yeah, sure. So, the conversation comes in a lot later in Australian art history and really kicks in with some postmodern artists. I feel like some of the big ideas that we have in our syllabus about postmodernism which are about things like appropriation, humour, irony, challenging art histories become a lot stronger in the 1980s and 1990s. But I do want to mention that there was this very strong design trends in mid century, like in the 1950s and 60s, like Margaret Preston's sort of wish came true. And Aboriginal motifs, themes, imagery in art and design almost exclusively made and produced and sold by non Aboriginal people became really, really popular, especially in what we call home decor. So, like design objects for use for decoration around the home. And so, in the nineties, we have this significant artist, Gordon Bennett start to come through in the Australian art scene. So, Gordon Bennett is an artist who had sort of a dual heritage. This is the way he self describes as having an Aboriginal and an Anglo Celtic heritage and his art making practice for his whole career pretty much becomes about exploring that tension between Aboriginal and non Aboriginal, both as part of his personal identity and as part of the Australian identity in the 1990s. This is a really big time for postmodernism. A lot of new ideas through in philosophy and in the art world about challenging the ideas and experiences of modernism. So, one thread that Gordon Bennett picks up on is some of this work by Margaret Preston.

So, Gordon Bennett goes back to Margaret Preston’s publication from 1925, where she's made these little paintings of designs based on shields and trees and things and he sort of takes them back and he makes these really big paintings out of these. And remember, like the Margaret Preston versions, they're very small, they're published in a magazine, she's saying, hey, take these and go off and design stuff. When Gordon Bennett takes them, he brings them back into the Art Gallery context and they're like 6ft tall. These are big, big abstract paintings that are almost exact copies of these small Margaret Preston works, and he calls it the Home Decor series. He does quite a few of these in different versions. And his point is really to start asking this question of like, what was the impact of this person's legacy? She's a non Aboriginal artist. She's taken all of this content from Aboriginal art. It was hugely influential in Australia to be used as decoration. And that's the way that this kind of Aboriginal knowledge and history has become accepted and become part of the national identity and become part of the prevailing art and design trends and for Gordon Bennett, it's really a way of challenging this idea of primitivism and bringing it back, I guess, back into an Aboriginal space, back into a fine art gallery kind of space, but also as a vehicle for him to explore his own personal identity as an Aboriginal person, as a non Aboriginal person is bringing all this stuff together. And it was something that was a huge part of his practice. And he's often quoted as saying, you know, he became really successful as an Aboriginal artist, or described as an urban Aboriginal artist, as opposed to a traditional Aboriginal artist. And he was uncomfortable with this, like, to be labelled in that way. And a lot of his work becomes about exploring these really complicated ideas about race identity at a personal level, but in a way that's also mirrored at the national level by what was going on in Australia at the time. Gordon Bennett turned out to be a really, really influential artist.

A lot of Aboriginal contemporary artists claim influence from Gordon Bennett and he did a lot of really important work, I think, in the art world, in Australia. In, I guess, similar to what Margaret Preston did for modernism, you could say that Gordon Bennett has done similar things for postmodernism in Australia, but also for bringing, you know, and that label of urban Aboriginal artists, one that gets used in Australian art history. So, use it again here. But bringing that into the mainstream in the art world in Australia. And this is a big influence on artists that came after him. People like Richard Bell, Tony Albert and Vernon Ah Kee. And so that takes us into the next part of this case study where we start looking at Tony Albert's work.

Jackie

And he's exhibition is actually called Conversations with Margaret Preston, isn't it? So that is how it brings it all back in. Can you tell us about Tony Albert?

Alex

Yeah, so Tony Albert's exhibition Conversations with Margaret Preston actually happened this year in 2021. So, this is very, very recent work, just for a little bit of context. Tony Albert's very open about having been influenced by Gordon Bennett. So, just a little, a little story, a little bit of trivia. One of Gordon Bennett's favourite artists was Jean-Michel Basquiat. One thing that Gordon Bennett does is appropriate Basquiat's work in his own painting, but he also starts writing Basquiat letters after his death. Like these open letters to say, hey, you've really influenced me the way I think about blackness, you know, the way we think about race and identity. And these letters to Basquiat are a big part of the Gordon Bennett story. Gordon Bennett also dies a few years ago. And Tony Albert has also written post humus letters to Gordon Bennett. Right? So, there's a clear thread again of influence here, from Gordon Bennett to Tony Albert. Tony Albert returns to this idea of Margaret Preston in 2021 with his exhibition Conversations with Margaret Preston. Now, aside from the fact that he's a big fan of Gordon Bennett, there's another thread here, where a huge part of Tony Albert's practice is about collecting these objects, which he calls Aboriginalia that are these design objects or home decor objects that feature either representations of Aboriginal people or just, you know, decorative versions of Aboriginal art in design objects. A lot of the stuff that he collects is from the mid-century 50s and 60s. They are things that were not designed or made by Aboriginal people, but these are the objects that establish, you know, like this visual culture in Australia is what does Aboriginal art look like before Aboriginal art by Aboriginal people started to come into prominence and become more popular, which didn't really happen until the 1970s.

This has been a part of Tony Albert's history for a long time. And ultimately, like the origins of these design objects are from Margaret Preston telling people to go out and use Aboriginal ideas when making their own visual designs and he's been using these objects for many years. But in this exhibition Conversations with Margaret Preston, he kind of brings it back full circle and what he does is appropriate Margaret Preston's work. So, he's got this sort of collection of Margaret Preston images, which he recreates, he blows them up. He makes them really big. Similar to what Gordon Bennett did. And just to paint a mental image, you may have seen artworks by Margaret Preston which are these really nice little prints or woodcut prints of flowers, like floral compositions in a vase of Australian native flowers. And what Tony Albert does is recreate those on a large scale. But the colour like instead of printing with colour, he uses this collage material, of found fabric featuring these Aboriginal designs and representations of Aboriginal people. So, like literally the artefacts that Margaret Preston was telling people to go out and make, he brings them back and puts them into her work to make this comment or to have a conversation of like, there are huge problems with some of these objects and the way that Aboriginal people were represented. The fact that Aboriginal designs were taken without permission or compensation and used in this way. But the other side of it, and this is something that Tony Albert says, is that she was very influential in getting the Australian public to care or to care about or accept Aboriginal art, even though it's happened in this way. That like on reflection in 2021, we can think, well, you know, that's a bit uneasy. We don't really like this idea of cultural appropriation or copying, but it was very influential and did it set the scene for the Australian public to accept art made by Aboriginal people, maybe. So that's basically it. So, there's this like 100 years thread of these big Australian artists saying, what should Australian art look like? It should look Aboriginal. And then it's become this huge trend in home decor and design, particularly in the 50s and 60s. And then in the late 20th century, in the postmodern period, in the early 21st century, we have these two Aboriginal artists saying, hold on, maybe we should talk about this a little bit and recognise that that is Margaret Preston’s legacy, that some of these objects are problematic and some of these representations are not good. And this idea of taking without permission or compensation should be reinvestigated. But also saying that part of her legacy, it could be said that part of her legacy, was it made it easier for Aboriginal art to enter mainstream Australian society.

Jackie

Fantastic. What a hugely deep dive that is. I love though, that you're able to take the time to really do a lot of research on this to be able to do a subject like this or the subject matter to really do that justice. And I know that you worked with the Aboriginal Outcomes and Partnerships team a lot on this to really ensure that it was culturally respectful.

Alex

Yeah.

Jackie

And you've got that really deep dive of research there for teachers as a backing. So, the resource is a student workbook and a really comprehensive teacher workbook with a whole range of different activities and it goes for a few weeks?

Alex

About six weeks. Yeah.

Jackie

So, now you've told us all of that history. Can you bring it back to the art syllabus, Visual Arts syllabus, and just explain how this is a typical of a case study for year 12?

Alex

So just for a little bit of context, this is a case study for the HSC visual art course. The way the course is structured is for the HSC is that for art making students work on their body of work and then in Critical and Historical Studies they do at least five case studies which are these sort of in depth investigations into the art world. There's a lot of flexibility in the Visual Arts syllabus. So, there's nothing to say you have to cover these artists or these movements or anything like that. It's up to teachers to use the language of our course content which is practice, conceptual framework and the frames to explore those ideas about visual arts. And there's actually a nice little diagram in the Stage Six Syllabus that indicates that by the HSC course these ideas practice, conceptual framework and the frames all cross over and become fully integrated. So, what this case study does is provide a line of investigation that uses that language of our course content to really unpack in significant detail these ideas about, you know, this particular thread of Australian art history and the way that the case study is set up is, as you said, we've got a student resource and this is pretty much set up like an interactive booklet that has a lot of activities. It's got a lot of source material, either linked or directly included in the document. And for each week there are three or four different activities for students to go through as if it were an investigation to find, you know, to go through and look at all the images of the works that are talked about in the case study. You know, there's readings and writing activities. So, it's sort of like the research has been done, but the way that students are asked to come to it is also like their own research investigation. They've just got all the sources provided to them already.

Jackie

Fantastic. And I really love as I moved through the resource, there was those links back to the frames scaffold and the conceptual framework scaffold and all of those writing scaffolds. And those questions that are related to the content in the syllabus is constantly bringing back that terminology and reminding students how to think about the content within your syllabus.

Alex

I would just say the guiding idea for this whole case study. It's very situated in the postmodern frame, right? We're looking at the way that established ideas in art history are being challenged by contemporary artists, by postmodern artists. And we're looking at appropriation as a major part of that practice. But because at this stage in the course these areas of content are closely integrated. We're not only looking at the post modern frame, we're not only looking at the frames either. There are these constant references to artist practice to relationships between artists, world, audience and artwork and those scaffolds you're referring to, I really like that we've used those. You know, they're up there on the stage six curriculum website for visual arts for anyone to use. And I think that there are some really good examples in this case study of how to use those resources, how to either set a summary activity for students that say, look at this scaffold and use some of the questions or for teachers to pull out specific questions and set them for the class. And so yeah, that use of those three scaffolds for practice, frames and conceptual framework, they come back constantly throughout this resource as the really obvious links back to the syllabus content. I think it's important to make some of those links really obvious for students to say we're using this part of the syllabus now, because when they go to sit the exam, they have to read through a list of questions that are categorized by practice, frames, conceptual framework and make a decision for what to use. So that kind of meta understanding of making students insiders in this process, I think is also really important.

Jackie

That's awesome. And you've started to move into my next question, which is what do you think the outcome for students is to do a case study like this?

Alex

I think there are two answers to this question. So firstly, it's the HSC, they have to sit an exam and the visual arts exam, as we know, has two sections. And section two, the essay section, is where they bring all of their knowledge and understanding of their case studies and respond to an essay question based on an area of the Syllabus. So, I think in a very literal way, this is a case study that provides a lot of detail about, I would say three really significant Australian artists. I think that Margaret Preston was one of the most significant artists of the 20th century in Australia. I think that Gordon Bennett was one of the most significant artists of the late 20th century in Australia. And I think that Tony Albert is one of the most significant artists currently working in this country. So, there are some really strong links there to art history specific to Australia. And whether or not a student will take the entire thread of this investigation into the exam, they at least have a lot of that context. Like they might take one of these artists works into their exam, into their response, or they might use the whole thing, it's up to them. There's a lot of content there for them to draw from. The other answer, is that I think this is a really important part of Australian art history that's been explored and re-examined by the two contemporary artists in the case study. I think that this idea about cultural appropriation and what's okay and what's not okay is a really complicated idea. It can be very difficult to unpack, it can be very difficult for teachers to approach sensitively. And so, I think that a resource like this gives teachers who may feel like it's beyond their scope or beyond their experience to talk about stuff like this, it gives them something that's already done and we did work closely with the Aboriginal Outcomes and Partnerships team. And so, I think that teachers should feel confident to take on this content and be able to use it in their classrooms without worrying, you know, if they're presenting this kind of sensitive content in the right way.

Jackie

And I think it's too, it's that difficult conversation, isn't it? And I just want to refer back to a podcast that was released at the start of this term and it was actually around music where we spoke with Dr Thomas Feinberg and Anthony Galluzzo from the Aboriginal Outcomes and Partnerships team. And they said how important it is for us to not be afraid of those conversations and I really love how that difficult conversation is sort of there and out there but done respectfully and done for the teachers as well.

Alex

And you know done for teachers in a pretty detailed way. We haven't really talked about the teacher resource for this one, but as you would expect, it contains a lot of syllabus links and things like this, but there are also worked examples of most of the writing tasks. So teachers, if they are not particularly familiar with these ideas with this art history with this content, they can look to these sample answers to all of the activities to be able to support their knowledge so that they can then go off and support their students, you know developing knowledge and understanding of this content.

Jackie

you're one step ahead of me the whole way through this podcast Alex. Now I want to ask how do you expect a teacher to be able to use this resource? It's a massive resource, as it is a six-week case study, do you expect that they would use the whole case study, could they use bits and pieces of it? There's lots of activities in each week. Yeah, let's break it down for teachers.

Alex

Yeah, so if you're a teacher and you're after a case study you can use this one, it's all there, it's complete, it's done. It is quite big and teachers will need to make some decisions about how much of the content to use or how detailed to go. And I don't think, I mean this is put out there for teachers to adapt and use in their classrooms. Right? And so there would be, what if teachers want to streamline the process a little bit? There are a lot of activities where we're asking students to go off and find the visual examples of these artworks. A teacher could just show those or give them to students instead of, you know, instead of getting the students to do it themselves. That said, a teacher might decide that it's advantageous for them to set things like these scavenger hunt, you know, looking for artwork examples, activities as pre-learning or as homework or something that students can collaborate on. So, although there are a lot of activities there, I think it's quite flexible, it's quite modular. If a teacher wanted to just give the information to students for some of the activities they could and those worked examples are there so that that content could be delivered quite quickly if you want to move through this a little bit faster. Instead of, you know, for a writing activity, you could guide students through that summary instead of going through this entire process of having them do all the reading come up with all their own ideas, the teacher can support students to get to that point themselves.

Jackie

Fantastic. And I think you've also touched on the fact that all of those sample writing tasks tend to have a sample or all the scaffolds have sample answers in there as well. So, you could also use this as a teacher to up skill yourself too, particularly if you're not familiar with this content.

Alex

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that for a teacher, if you're going to start looking at this, it would be a good idea to maybe skim through the teacher resource and you know, just check it out. Like there is a lot of information there, you know, we wanted to give teachers a pretty complete package here that they could use to upskill themselves, take into the classroom, use as is or adapt, take parts of it, change them.

Jackie

Fantastic. Well, we've talked for way longer than we were going to, but that's okay because this is a really important topic. I think it's a very in depth topic and I really hope that it can help teachers and, I'm thinking, as you were going through and explaining all of the history, this podcast in itself could be a really fantastic accompanying resource for the case study. So, to find that case study teachers, I'm going to put a link in our show notes that you can click on and get directly to the case study on the website or you can head to the New South Wales Department of Education website and it is on the Creative Arts Curriculum page.

Alex. Thanks for giving us an art lesson today an art history lesson.

Alex

Thanks for having me, Jackie. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk a lot about something that I'm really interested in.

Jackie

Yeah, and that really shows thank you for your time.

Alex

Thank you.

Jackie

This podcast was brought to you by the Creative Arts Curriculum Team of Secondary Learners, Educational Standards Directorate of the New South Wales Department of Education. Get involved in the conversation by joining our Statewide Staffroom through the link in the show notes or email our Creative Arts Curriculum Advisor, Cathryn Horvat at creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au. The music for this podcast was composed by Alex Manton and audio production by Jason King.

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