Cross-curricular learning at Emanuel School

As part of our School’s strategic planning for the coming years, Emanuel’s Board and Executive worked together, along with input from our teachers, to highlight the ways in which learning must continually innovate to reflect the changing world into which our students graduate.

Amongst a range of skills and dispositions highlighted as those essential for our graduates to engage with and navigate the challenges they encounter in the 21^st century workforce, linking with the recent report The New Basics, delivered by the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA), was the importance of connection-making. This capacity to see and draw meaning from the links and interconnectedness of the learning across a range of disciplines is a significant factor in students deriving meaning, finding interest and maintaining engagement in their learning. 

Along with interdisciplinary learning, the ‘enterprise skills’ – problem solving, communication skills, critical thinking, creativity, teamwork, presentation skills, digital and financial literacy – will be essential attributes for long-term job success. With the world into which our students graduate from school changing so rapidly, and the nature of the workforce undergoing constant and fundamental shifts, it is essential that our classroom practices adapt too.

In 2017, we’ve implemented a change in our Years 7 and 8 Visual Arts and Music programs that provides for teaching that links the learning in these subjects. For our Year 8 students, they will notice that their timetable currently only features one of these subjects – Music OR Visual Arts – and that the number of periods per week that they are attending that subject has doubled from last year.

NESA, the NSW Education Standards Authority (formerly the Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards – BOSTES) mandates that all NSW students undertake at least 100 hours of Visual Arts and 100 hours of Music at some stage during Years 7 and 8. For a number of years, we have fulfilled this requirement by timetabling both subjects, for two 40 minute periods per week, for all of Years 7 and 8. This year, in line with our strategic move towards implementing opportunities for cross-curricular learning, where appropriate, we have adjusted the timetabling to meet the required 100 hours in a different way. We now timetable each subject for four 40 minute periods per week, but for only six months of the year, and then, in the other six months, the students will complete the other subject for four 40 minute periods per week.

To continue the students’ engagement in Visual Arts (while studying Music) and in Music (while studying Visual Arts), our new course structure involves an end-of semester culmination in a project-based learning task that requires students from both Music and Visual Arts to collaborate authentically. This effectively engages students in the same project throughout the entire year, though they will be approaching it through the two different disciplines.

This change enables our students to have a much richer, in-depth exposure to each subject, by having more regular involvement in their Music or Visual Arts learning, rather than having a few periods scattered across the fortnight. It is important to note that the students have not had a reduction in the time we allocate to Music and Visual Arts.

This model of semesterised Visual Arts and Music is quite common in schools, and certainly works effectively, with schools in which this is the model no less able to ignite their students’ passion in the Arts as a result of the timetable structure.

We are excited to see the product of this innovation in our delivery of our Visual Arts and Music programs in Years 7 and 8.

Adam Majsay, Director of Studies 7-12