Who are the arts for?
Te toi whakairo, ka ihiihi, ka wehiwehi, ka aweawe te o katoa.
Artistic excellence makes the world sit up in wonder.
The arts are for everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand – to know who we are and what we are becoming.
The arts develop the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. They challenge our ideas and contribute to our social, cultural, and spiritual understandings. They are essential components of a dynamic society.
The arts are powerful forms of expression that recognise, value, and contribute to the unique bicultural and multicultural character of Aotearoa New Zealand. They enrich all our lives.
The arts and young people
Through the arts, young people participate in collaborative and individual endeavours that contribute to community well-being and personal identity.
The arts allow our culturally diverse and connected students to form and frame identities through physical, imagined, and digital worlds.
Through the arts, students create and challenge ideas (sounds, movements, images, texts) that reflect, communicate, and change views of the world.
Why should students study the arts?
As creators, presenters, viewers, and listeners, students can participate in, interpret, value, and enjoy the arts throughout their lives.
The arts foster, challenge, and stretch originality, innovation, and imagination, and engage the minds, bodies, senses, and feelings of young people.
Students learn to think creatively, critically, and reflectively. They develop understandings that will enable them to enjoy working, both independently and collaboratively, to create, perform in, and evaluate art works.
They learn to construct meanings and to respond to and value others’ contributions to shared endeavours such as Rock Quest, Polyfest and Stage Challenge, Top Art, the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival, and the Big Sing.
As they express and interpret ideas within creative, aesthetic, and technological frameworks, students build the confidence to take risks. They learn how to think “outside the box”, engage with unexpected outcomes, and discover multiple solutions to challenging problems. Through learning the arts, students develop greater consciousness and resilience for their futures.
Through the arts, students explore and celebrate artistic expressions of self, community, and culture. They explore Toi Māori and learn to value the forms and practices of customary and contemporary Māori performing, musical, and visual arts. Through engaging in Toi Māori, new and evolving art forms that are unique to Aotearoa New Zealand can develop. These will empower learners to deepen their notions of identity.
Students in years 11–13 may specialise in the disciplines of dance, drama, music – sound arts, visual arts, art history, or undertake study in multimedia and other new technologies. Specialist studies in the arts enable students to contribute their vision, abilities, and energies to arts initiatives and creative industries.
As their knowledge and skills develop, students build on their experiences, and create, perform, and evaluate art works of increasing sophistication and complexity.
Learners in the arts are able to view their world from new perspectives.
Last updated May 13, 2012