Pre-AP Visual Art

Pre-AP offers four year-long courses in the Arts: Pre-AP Dance, Pre-AP Music, Pre-AP Theatre, and Pre-AP Visual Arts.

These four distinct courses share themes, underlying unit foundations, and areas of focus. Frameworks, model lessons, and performance assessments are specific to each course and are designed to be incorporated into schools’ existing performance-focused arts courses.

Frameworks are structured around skills associated with ideation, experimentation, creation, revision, reflection, and analysis—processes and activities that artists use while producing their work.

Areas of Focus

The Pre-AP Arts areas of focus are vertically aligned to the practices embedded in high school and college arts courses, including AP. This gives students multiple opportunities to prioritize and strengthen these disciplinary skills throughout their course of study.

• Analysis and interpretation: Students observe, investigate, and discuss a limited number of anchor works, which are works of art central to the themes and content of a particular module, and relate these examples to their own creative work.

• Peer-to-peer dialogue: Students engage in structured conversations with peers to share ideas, respond to and offer advice on works in progress, critique final works, and discuss next steps.

• Experimentation: Students generate and consider a range of options for both the technical and expressive content of their work and make purposeful decisions about which options to incorporate in the work.

• Reflective writing: Students communicate and clarify ideas in writing throughout the creative process: as a component of research and idea generation, in describing works in progress, and in reflecting on final works.

Big Ideas

These big ideas are integrated throughout all modules of each course:

• Observe and interpret

• Practice and experiment

• Research and make

• Reflect and evaluate

• Revise and share