Environmental Education and The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum: Draft

The aim of The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum is to enable students to develop literacies in dance, drama, music, and the visual arts as they learn the languages of the arts, develop ideas in the arts, communicate and interpret meaning in the arts, and understand the arts in context. To achieve this aim, all students will have opportunities to develop skills, knowledge, attitudes, and understanding in a broad range of art forms, including:

• the unique art forms of Māori, the tangata whenua;
• New Zealand art forms with European or North American traditions and histories;
• New Zealand art forms resulting from recent overseas influences, such as from Asia or Australia;
• art forms that combine Māori and non-Māori approaches;
• art forms from the Pacific Islands;
• traditional and contemporary art forms outside New Zealand.

The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum: Draft, page 10

The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum: Draft (Ministry of Education, 1999) contains a range of achievement objectives that provide opportunities for integrating the aims, key concepts, and key dimensions of environmental education with arts programmes. [Note: the reference is to the draft version since the environmental education guidelines were written before the final version of The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum was gazetted. The web link is to the final version of the arts document.]

The following section, organised by strands, identifies the disciplines, strands, and achievement objectives in The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum: Draft and suggests some associated study topics that could be used to meet the aims of environmental education and explore its concepts and dimensions. Potentially, any arts activity could be based on issues related to the environment. For this reason, the section presents examples drawn from the broad expression of the achievement aims for each strand. (This is the online version of the table on pages 42 to 43 of Guidelines for Environmental Education in New Zealand Schools.)

Skills developed in the arts can contribute to meeting all of the aims and provide a means of engaging with all of the concepts of environmental education.

The arts provide opportunities for exploring the key dimensions of environmental education. Learning in the arts can be undertaken through education in the environment, such as when students use their experiences in the environment to initiate and develop ideas in dance, drama, music, or the visual arts. Education about the environment can be pursued through a range of learning experiences, such as when students engage in experiences that assist them to better understand the natural and built environment and the effects of people on it. Education for the environment will occur when students act on their learning in ways that maintain and improve the quality of the environment, such as when they use skills developed in the arts to advance an environmental issue.

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