Planning an arts-led curriculum

Could you create a photograph with no shadow? Using skilful questioning and a creative context, Jonathan Lear leads children through a journey of scientific discovery...

From the outset, one of my main aims when redesigning our school’s curriculum was to achieve balance. Over the last three issues, I’ve written about how we’ve given each of the three terms a different focus. So far we’ve spent a term on history and a term on geography – now we have a term to work on the arts.   
 
Throughout the year, art, music, dance, and D&T have been woven into other topics as enhancements. However, in the summer term, they come to the fore and take centre stage in units that incorporate a variety of subjects and allow children to work in different media.

Year 1: Incredible Creatures (art, music and dance)
Year 2: Soundscapes (music and design technology)
Year 3: The Great Outdoors (art, music and design technology)
Year 4: Cool Britannia (design technology, art and music)
Year 5: Life Through a Lens (art, enterprise)
Year 6: All the World’s a Stage (art, drama and design technology)
 
To look at how these ideas might be developed, we’ll focus on the Year 5 topic: ‘Life through a Lens’.
 
There are two key areas of learning in this unit, one being photographic art, and the other being light. 
 
The decision to create a topic on photography came from the desire to use a different approach to a science unit on light. I don’t think there’s anything worth knowing about light that couldn’t be accessed through learning about photography. Shadows, reflection, spectrum of light – there’s certainly everything that’s needed in the primary curriculum.
 
Whilst photography isn’t named as an approved media in the embarrassingly brief art section of the new primary curriculum, it does mention giving children the opportunity to produce creative work whilst exploring ideas and recording their experiences.
 
As with the topics from our Discover and Explore terms, I decided to draw upon the Mantle of the Expert (MoE) approach to create a meaningful unit with real purpose (mantleoftheexpert.com). 
 
As with all MoE projects, there needs to be a client with a problem, and in this case it’s a gallery owner who’s been terribly let down by an unreliable artist.

Setting the scene

In the last issue, for the Explore unit, we used a Skype call to introduce the problem to the children. This time, it could be an email from the worried gallery owner, or maybe a news report from a local paper along the lines of ‘Local Gallery owner faces ruin after famous artist pulls out!’ 
 
It transpires that the gallery owner has an exhibition planned in six weeks’ time (or however long the topic is going to last!) and plans for the exhibition are already under way. The artist who let him down was a photographer intending to exhibit a range of different works entitled ‘Light and Dark’. 
 
After identifying the specific nature of the task, there are inevitable questions that need to be asked, and potential areas of learning that we can begin to explore. 
 
If we are going to create a photographic or digital media exhibition that meets the brief, we need to build our knowledge in two key areas. 

• Photography: What do we know about taking photographs? What do we need to know?
• Science: What does/could ‘Light and Dark’ mean? What elements of light and dark could we explore?

To help develop our knowledge and understanding of the first area, we could ask a local studio, or photographer to come into school and run a workshop. If we begged, borrowed or stole digital cameras / smart phones / tablets from around school, we might have enough for the children to develop their skills in small groups of three or four. This might include work on basic camera function, composition, and digital manipulation of images using a range of software or apps. 
 
Having the basics of photography in place allows us to explore the second science-themed area of Light and Dark with a little more freedom. 
 
To begin with, the children are shown photographs or artwork that capture shadows in interesting ways. This could be used as a discussion starter, which allows the teacher to assess the children’s existing knowledge of how shadows are formed:

• How do you think the photographer composed this picture?
• Where might they have been standing?
• Can you tell where the light source is?

The children could also be asked to consider the artistic nature of the work:

• What effect do you think the artist wanted to create?
• How does the photograph make you feel

Following this, they would be tasked with going off in groups to compose and create their own photographs that demonstrate a range of different effects, which could be created through experimenting with shadows. 

Directing child-led learning

Whilst there is a strong sense of the children directing their own learning, to be successful, there needs to be careful, albeit subtle, control from the teacher. Through sharing photographs, we have already modelled examples of ‘what a good one looks like’ - but we’re about to send children off armed with a digital camera and the freedom to take pictures. In this instance, we’re likely to get back hundreds of hastily taken snaps that will range vastly in quality. To address this, we can put in place some limitations. 
 
Limiting resources or actions can be a very effective way of managing child-led learning. In this case, the children might be told that they are only allowed to take six pictures that demonstrate a range of different effects created with shadow. This then automatically encourages more thoughtful and considered composition of the pictures. The groups will have to discuss locations, angles, and use of objects to build their picture before the final act of recording their work with a camera. 
 
At the end of the session, the children’s work could be shared and the scientific language around the creation of their photographs explored together as a class. A natural development of this would be to then focus on any of the other areas of light that were appropriate. This may include reflection, diffusion, filtering, splitting (light spectrum) or bending (refraction) of light. 
Alongside the science work, there is also the issue of the gallery opening. As with all Mantle of the Expert projects, there is a real purpose to the work, and this brings with it a host of complications (opportunities!) that the children might address. 

• Where will the exhibition be?
• What space might we use?
• Who do we want to come?
• How will they know about it, how might we promote it?
• Is it free, or do we charge?
• How will we look after the visitors?
• How could we help them to understand our work?

Each of these questions adds further layers to the topic and additional tension or challenge. How many you use (and to what degree they are explored) is very much dependent on how immersed you want the children to be, which connections you think are most valuable, and how much time you want to spend on the topic. If it was me, I think I’d go all out – I’d find it really hard to resist throwing in a last-minute, week-before-opening surprise booking from a coach load of French or Spanish tourists. The multilingual challenge would be enough to make most grown adults weep, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the children might just rise to the occasion!