New Course (First Exams 2027)

Welcome to the new Visual Arts course

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Here you will find an overview of the new syllabus content and a summary of the learning objectives that form the pedagogical basis of the course. Despite some significant changes, there are many similarities with the previous curriculum in terms of how the course is taught, and for most teachers the transition should be relatively easy.

Teachers provide foundational skills, with structures and scaffolding for students to learn during the first part of the course, and they continue to provide guidance throughout, but students are expected to be even more actively engaged in their own learning. Self-directed art making led by inquiry claims its place at the heart of the course.

The syllabus features art making as inquiry

What does this mean? Art making as inquiry is a hybrid approach taken from contemporary art practices which combines both scholarship and studio practice.^[1]

Scholarship means engaging in research, critical thinking, contextualization, art language, critique and reflection.

Studio practice is the making of art through exploration, interpretation, imagination, elaboration and transformation of materials and ideas.

Inquiry based learning across all IB subjects encourages independent approaches to learning. Art in particular favors a form of inquiry that is playful, inventive and follows nonlinear paths of discovery. Find out more about Lines of Inquiry here  

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Positive Points

We think these approaches to learning will make this course satisfying for teachers and empowering for students.

• Self-directed art making led by inquiry is at the center of the course
• A holistic approach to teaching in which the assessment tasks are not the syllabus
• Clearly differentiated assessment tasks with reduced number of criteria
• Explicit differentiation between HL and SL
• Reduced requirements for written evidence with greater value on visual evidence
• Renewed focus on how artwork is situated within context
• Emphasis on digital curation of work, no exhibition requirement

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The course components (assessed tasks)

 At the end of this course, students provide evidence of how they learned to create, connect and communicate, which is assessed by way of 3 required assessment tasks differentiated for HL and SL.

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Find out more about each of the component tasks on these pages.

Individual rubrics for each task can be found in the pages under Assessment (first exams 2027)

Footnotes

1. https://www.artasinquiry.art/about1-c1x1t