The NSEAD Big Landscape of the Art & Design Curriculum
By Ged Gast, NSEAD past president and joint chair of the Best Practice special interest groups (SIG)
Art and design teachers have always found curriculum development challenging, due mainly to the absence of both commonly-defined subject content, and agreement on what is best practice. This is a double-edged sword, because it also provides flexibility, encouraging teachers to determine their own content, with relevance to local and community contexts and an emphasis on their own interests, specialism and values.
Central also to the purpose of teaching art and design is the development of creativity, which can become devalued by over-specification. This can lead to an orthodoxy of common creative practice which limits the development of individuality, creativity and the personal response of each learner. For this reason, art and design specialists avoid prescription and the repetition of detailed project plans or schemes of work. Many chose to modify or rework their schemes annually in response to baseline assessments, changing interest and the evolving needs of learners.
In 2020, the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) commissioned a Special Interest Group of members (SIG) to develop guidance that would provide evidence to support members exploration of what is considered best practice. This resulted in the development of a new curriculum and best practice website, called the Big Landscape. Phase 1 launches in September 2023 with further phases introducing interactivity, uploading of exemplars, links, member comments and content. This is not a fixed or prescribed curriculum. The group mapped and created an aide-memoir of the scope of the curriculum, and organised it as an interactive curriculum planning and research tool for the personal and professional development of members.
The Big Landscape Overview page maps the art and design curriculum using a structure of three horizontal bands defining the What, the Why and the How. The blue What band describes the subject specific content. The green Why band sets out the cross curriculum, thematic, and critical curriculum that links with other subjects. It also develops the wider aspects and dimensions of the curriculum to develop young people and at the same time, provide a structure to contextualise the learning. The brown How band provides guidance on teaching and learning. It includes different pedagogies, supported by conceptual models and diagrams that explain approaches to structuring learning.
The Home page and the Overview page of the Big Landscape website provide an interface from which educators can browse sections of the curriculum, exploring areas of content. Users can select bands or blocks, to see definitions, explanations, exemplars and links to research, articles, professional papers and illustrated practice. The site can also be searched by keywords.
Information and a link to the Big Landscape can be found on the NSEAD website.
