In middle school, the students have arts from grade 6 to grade 10. For grade 6 to grade 8, they will experience all three arts: Visual Arts, Music and Theater. When they get to grade 9, they start to narrow down their choices to two of the three arts of whatever one that they feel most interested in and when they get to grade 10 they only choose one which they take all year long.

In the diploma program，art is an optional class.. The students who choose it are usually students who are interested in going to study art or design or they just generally like art.   

We look at the New Brunswick(Canada) standards for visual art and then we map it to the art standards for IB. What's really good about the art program is that it's really open. As a team, we get together and scaffold the skills that the students need to learn from grade 6 all the way to grade 10. 

In grade 6, students learn a lot about the elements of art and they are exposed to many different art forms to get a feel of what it is to be an artist and to create. And as the years go on to grade 10, it gets a bit more focused. 

For units of inquiry, the most important thing about art is to give students the ability to have creative thinking. In the world we live in today, it's not about memorizing things or knowing things, it's how we are able to think on our feet creatively, come up with options and how we think critically. These are really important things that the students learn in visual arts class. 

One thing that's really unique about our school is we use “Teaching Artistic Behaviors” called TAB and that really focuses on the student as an artist and how the classroom is their own studio. Students are encouraged to think like artists and make good choices. 

https://teachingforartisticbehavior.org/our-history/

In the primary years program, we do that a lot and the students have a lot of student choice and ownership over what they do. When they get to middle school, from grade 6 to grade 10, we have a unit called the studio project. 

Every year the students get to create an artwork of their choice, so they go through the creative process, the art cycle and IB where they learn to investigate, develop, create and evaluate the artwork. They will research an artist, use research techniques and go through the process of creating an artwork of their choice. 

A lot of the time, students come up with these amazing projects that the art teachers probably wouldn't have come up with on their own. They bring their own spin and style to the project, which I think really gives them a lot of ownership. 

By the time students get to the diploma program, they should know enough about the different media that they're doing. They get to choose the work that they want to do. It's really great preparation for the students in Grade 11 and 12. The skills they have built over the years allow them to create a body of artwork with their artistic intention for their IB assessments. It becomes cohesive and their creations will be shown during their DP Exhibition at the end of the diploma program. 

在艺术中，我们教授的最重要的事情和最重要的目标是可以终生欣赏艺术，即使你不会成为一名艺术家。当你去看展览或欣赏生活中的艺术时，你知道它是如何制作的，质量如何。我们教学生艺术时，从来不会给出正确的答案。同一件事物每个人都有不同的视角去看待，我认为这是视觉艺术提供的一项非常重要的技能。

本周，我们采访了视觉艺术与设计部门的负责人Gloria Carnevale老师，了解 ISNS 的艺术课程及其独特性。