Teaching a Diverse Primary Art Curriculum

This book will be a practical guide for primary art teachers looking to diversify their art curriculum and challenge the status quo of current art education.

Primary School Teachers are expected to be experts in everything. It is not a surprise that many teachers fall back on the usual suspects when planning their art curriculum: Monet, Picasso, Warhol, Matisse; there won’t be many primary schools you visit where these names aren’t on the list. After all, this is the diet of art that most of us were fed during our own educations.

This book is for Primary teachers looking to shake up their art curriculum. The children in our Primary Schools deserve an art curriculum that is as wonderfully diverse as they are. We need to choose artists that represent and create conversation; artists that challenge conventions and open our eyes. We need to bring these incredible people to the forefront so that our children can be empowered to see art as something that is really and truly for everyone.

My approach is to make this book a usable guide to diverse art teaching by providing inspiration and ideas that can be taken off the shelf, into the classroom and used straight away. Each chapter will focus on a different art form and contain suggested artists who challenge the canon of art being the domain of white men. Each chapter will include simple, child-friendly histories of the artists and the context in which they sit within the history of art. This provides teachers with the subject knowledge needed to teach the children about these artists with confidence and at an age-appropriate level. These potted histories will then progress into practical teaching ideas to get children responding to the artist’s unique work. This could be through starting points for open ended projects, or one-off pieces. All the ideas will be backed up with photographed examples to make the content clear and user-friendly.

I also wish to include a chapter unpicking problematic art themes often explored in Primary Schools for example “African Art”; where centuries of rich culture, creativity and diversity from an entire continent are reduced to a simple image or object for example “African Masks.” I would like to suggest alternative ways of engaging children with art from around the world in a broader and more inclusive sense, introducing them to incredible makers that create work inspired by their own cultures. This chapter will open up the curriculum to the myriad of artistic styles that have existed throughout history and across the world.

I want this book to be a positive force, full of potential and inspiration. Something that will empower teachers to feel like subject specialists and encourage them to see the value of a rich and diverse art education. It is not about replacing the old masters or belittling their contribution to art history, but enriching the curriculum further by presenting a more balanced view of the true diversity of art. It is my hope that ultimately, this book will be the catalyst that gives teachers the skills and passion to create starting points of their own as they continue to embed diversity into their own unique and individual primary art curriculums.