What is Art by Doust
What will you find on this website?
This website was built as part of the Central Queensland Universities Unit called "Teaching the Arts". The content contained within this website was created from the two assessments undertaken over the course of this unit.
The first assessment focused on the Arts strand of the Australian Curriculum and created the following pages - Resource Package, Challenges One, Two and Three. Challenge One and Two is based on Visual Art, and three is music focused. The Resource Package is called 'Lines and Dots' and centres on Optical Illusion Art (or OpArt). It was created for the band years 5 & 6. The Resource Package includes a few teaching resources:
- a teacher guide
- student ebook
- resources such as printable activities and PDF for Smartboard teaching
The second assessment focuses on the Technology strand of the Australian Curriculum. This strand is broken down into two separate subjects - Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies. Challenges Seven & Eight (Design and Technologies), Nine and Ten (Digital Technologies) were created as part of this assessment. Lastly, an opinion piece is found on the 'Our Conversation' page and is the culmination of this unit of work.
This article is to reflect our learning as pre-service teachers over the length of this unit. In true learning style, the product of the article is not the goal but the process of writing the article. I think Gabora from 'The Conversation' described the process well stating creativity is a cognitive process and "transforms one's understanding of, or relationship to, the world" (2017, para.6). Through this article, we will reflect on what we have learnt and create an opinion piece based on a topic or question raised during the gaining of this knowledge. The outcome or content of the opinion piece created by the students from this course will be as individual as we are, just as our journey through this unit has been. The opinion piece has the following parameters:
- written in a format similar to articles found in 'The Conversation.'
- answering a relevant topic or question to do with the Technology Strand.
- reading age of 14-15-year-olds.
The Conversation was created ten years ago by academics and journalists, who joined together to write easy-to-read articles for the general public. Building a bridge that is often broken between academics and the general public. That bridge includes turning important research, often written in the difficult (and boring) language, into engaging and educative information for the 'average joe' - you and me.
Before starting this opinion piece, it is important to define the 'average joe' or the audience of this article. The Australian Government provides statistical data on Australian adults reading levels (see table below). Research indicates 52% of Australian adults have a reading level of 3 or above (Australian Government, 2021). So targeting this article to reader capabilities of around grades 8-10 is appropriate. It allows this article to be accessible and understood by a larger audience group.
(Australian Government, 2021)