A guide to

Cambridge
Lower Secondary
Art & Design

A guide to the Cambridge Lower Secondary Programme

Introduction

Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design sparks learners’ imagination and creativity. It helps them to express themselves and develops transferable skills such as creativity. Learners explore and push boundaries to become reflective, critical and decisive thinkers. They learn how to articulate personal responses to their experiences. They also learn to think about how their artistic development will support them in all areas of their education.

Our curriculum encourages learners to explore a range of art, and respond to ideas from a variety of local and global contexts. As learners move through the Lower Secondary stages, it is expected that their personalities and personal interests will come to the fore. Teachers should therefore help them to source their own experiences and to make their own selections from available resources. Part of this experience will involve giving learners broad themes. These should allow them to express their creativity and personal interests, using materials that they select from the complete range that is available.

Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design learners:

see themselves as artists and become increasingly independent and reflective
develop the skills needed to express creative ideas and to communicate visually
understand their place and the place of others in an interconnected, creative and innovative world
make informed decisions about creative practices and products and about the art and design they encounter, engage with and generate
understand the role of the creative arts in society
analyse and reflect on issues and creative ideas, practices and outputs from different perspectives.

Teaching Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design

We provide a wide range of practical resources, detailed guidance, innovative training and professional development so that you can give your learners the best possible experience of Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design.

We believe that for teaching and learning to be effective, there should be alignment between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. We have designed Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design around this principle:

two learners dipping brushes and painting

Curriculum – taken from Lower Secondary Art & Design Curriculum Framework

TWA.01 Generate, develop, create, innovate and communicate ideas by using and connecting the artistic processes of experiencing, making and reflecting.

Pedagogy –activity taken from the Stage 9 Scheme of Work

Learners consider the theme of ‘Identity’. They discuss what the term means as a group but ultimately make individual choices but how they are going to experiment with representing their own identity. As examples, they could consider their heritage, family, interests, or they may take a more literal response and look at creating a self-portrait.

Ideas of what to record might directly link to the initial discussion of the theme (including reference to the work of other artists) or learners may expand and develop these initial ideas.

Depending on the direction the learner decides to take, they gather images using a combination of the following:

drawing from secondary source images, searched from the Internet, magazines, books and/or post cards
drawing from direct observation, portraits, objects, landscapes, views from within a room, or looking out of a window
drawing from location visits such as buildings, local natural surroundings, relevant museums or galleries.

Learners build on these initial ideas by taking photographs related to and exploring the theme. This could include photographs of special interests, hobbies, sports, friends, inside of handbag/rucksack, home, family members, facial expressions, reflection in the mirror, hands, gestures, meals, places of special significance such as bedroom, library, school, shoe collection.

Assessment

Learners record their experiments with both the theme and the presentation.

Learners should use the visual journal to experiment and record thoughts and ideas. They should acknowledge the experiments that were pursued and those that were not. They should also reflect upon how effectively they feel have responded to the theme.

row of learners sitting on a wall outdoors and sketching

Curriculum Framework

The Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design Curriculum Framework is available to download on the Art & Design (0073) page of the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site. It provides a comprehensive set of learning objectives that give a structure for teaching and learning and can be used to assess learners’ attainment and skills development.

We have divided the learning objectives into four main areas called ‘strands’. These are:

Experiencing
Making
Reflecting
Thinking and Working Artistically

Although each strand is distinct, they work together to provide a holistic approach to the development of the learner as an artist and of the overall artistic process. These connections, and the role of each strand in the artistic process, are illustrated by the following diagram:

The learning objectives for Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design describe the concepts and approaches that apply to artists of all ages and levels of expertise. For this reason, we use the same learning objectives to structure learning from the Cambridge Primary stages and through Stages 7 to 9.

Within the Curriculum Framework, the learning objectives are supported with progression guidance. This shows what a learner could achieve at Stages 7 to 8 and at Stage 9 against each objective and within each strand. This progression guidance is available for each of the learning objectives in Section 4 of the Curriculum Framework.

See the table below for examples of this:

Curriculum Framework

We have divided the learning objectives into four main areas called ‘strands’. These are:

Experiencing
Making
Reflecting
Thinking and Working Artistically

See the table below for examples of this:

Strand	Stages 7 and 8	Stage 9
Experiencing	The role of art, craft and design is compared across local and global cultures and across historical periods, including the present.	Learners’ selections and explorations are clearly influenced by research into art from different times and cultures.
Making	Tools, technologies and processes are explored, both independently and collaboratively, and peer-assessment is used to identify and discuss outcomes throughout the making process.	The selection of materials and processes becomes the learners’ own choice and demonstrates innovation.
Reflecting	Contextual links are identified between different artworks.	Learners appreciate how other artists take inspiration from their surroundings, experiences and their peers.
Thinking and Working Artistically	The work of artists and other learners is used both to stimulate creative ideas and to inform problem solving. Learners are increasingly responsible for the selection of the artists they research to inspire their creativity and their experimentation with new technical skills.	Learners access art and design independently, to suit their own interests. They are more aware of the art, and the sources of art, that are available to them and they demonstrate awareness of how art and design affects their own lives and that of those around them.

Pedagogy

The Curriculum Framework gives you a list of learning objectives and the supporting progression guidance. Our support materials then give you guidance on:

the order in which to teach the objectives
ways of grouping them
how to split the objectives into smaller steps, and how to differentiate to make the work easier or harder
suitable activities through which to teach
ideas for active learning.

Our support materials include:

Schemes of Work
Teacher Guide
Training

Find and access these support materials, on the Art & Design (0073) page of the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site. You can find more general information about these support materials on the About Cambridge Lower Secondary page of the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site.

Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design is designed to be taught using a broad range of artistic encounters and experiences and to encourage learners to experiment and reflect. The types of art you choose will be determined by:

your local context
the other global contexts that you wish to explore with your learners
the resources that you have available
each learner’s personality and interests.

It is important that learners continually follow the artistic process by:

experiencing materials and the work of others
making their own art
reflecting on their own work and that of others
refining their own work or gathering the experiences that they can use to inform later pieces of work.

Learners can follow this process whether they are working with pencil, paint, weaving materials, fabric, clay or other model-making materials. It is also important for them to understand that they do not need to follow the process in any prescribed order. By increasingly thinking like artists, they should begin to adapt the process for themselves to suit each individual piece of work. As Lower Secondary learners become more independent, they may also begin to experiment with materials that are not traditionally associated with art.

It is important that you help your learners understand how the strands of the curriculum are linked. This will help them begin to think and work like artists, and to understand the benefit of adaptability. All art and design activity should support learners to experience, make and reflect. It is important to discuss, demonstrate and explore these steps through teaching and learning.

**Complete the activity**

**Complete the activity**

The following table shows an example of how learners can follow an artistic process. However, the learning objectives are missing. Use the information in the completed columns to identify the learning objectives you think apply to each stage of the process.

Capturing local architecture
Stage of Artistic Process	Learning Objectives	Activity
Experiencing		Learners view images of buildings from a range of artists and contexts and make notes and brief sketches to capture their observations.
Making and Thinking and Working Artistically		Learners select a local view and produce a series of sketches of the central building and its surroundings. They can select a range of materials and different angles for their sketches. The materials that they use should be selected to reflect the scene being drawn however.
Experiencing Making and Thinking and Working Artistically		Learners consider the surface texture of different buildings and experiment with a range of materials to consider different ways of expressing those textures.
Making		Learners select one of their initial sketches and the most suitable outputs from their experiments with texture to produce a final output which represents their chosen building and its surroundings.
Reflection and Thinking and Working Artistically		Learners present their work to the class and discuss their reasons for choosing the scene, the materials and the techniques. They also discuss the challenges that they encountered and how they overcame them; they should acknowledge any advice and support that they received from their peers. They use the feedback that they receive to complete a personal reflection on their work in their visual journals.

For more information on the approaches to teaching and learning in Cambridge Lower Secondary Art & Design, refer to Section 3.4 of the Teacher Guide.

girl holding up artwork as another girl looks at her

Assessment Guidance

Assessment guidance provides support and advice on how to assess learners in the classroom, including:

examples of how teaching and learning activities can be assessed
approaches to recording achievement
different approaches to reporting results.

There is no Cambridge Lower Secondary Progression Test or Checkpoint for this subject.

Find the Assessment guidance on the Art & Design (0073) page of the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site.

You can find more general information about Assessment guidance on the About Cambridge Lower Secondary page of the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site.

Assessment

Assessment guidance provides support and advice on how to assess learners in the classroom, including:

examples of how teaching and learning activities can be assessed
approaches to recording achievement
different approaches to reporting results.

Find the Assessment guidance on the Art & Design (0073) page of the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site.

You can find more general information about Assessment guidance on the About Cambridge Lower Secondary page of the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site.