Welcome to the new Visual Arts course

The new curriculum unveiled!

The new Visual Arts Guide with first exams in 2027 is now published and the 79-page document is available on MyIB. Our mission here at InThinking is to unpack the guide for you, synthesize the aims and objectives of the course, offer insights, creative strategies and resources to support teachers in successfully teaching the course.

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 new 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.

Exciting Changes!

We think there are some very positive changes that will make teaching this course more satisfying for teachers and more 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
• Greater 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

The new 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.

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)

Selected Pages