Postgraduate Module Descriptor

EARM002: Primary Art

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Aims

The module will focus on extending the breadth and depth of your understanding of art education in several directions, in order that you can develop children’s art learning in a number of ways. These include:

  • To help you develop a critical, reflective, and creative approach to teaching art that fosters children’s enthusiasm for learning 
  • To encourage you to appreciate the wider role of art in relation to cultural diversity and to use research to develop a contemporary and critical view of art education in theory and practice
  • To gain a deeper understanding of approaches to teaching art in order to understand its place in the curriculum and ways in which it can relate to other subjects.
  • To focus on leadership in art to enable you to evaluate and select materials, organize the subject within a school, and support your colleagues’ art teaching.
  • To be aware of effective approaches for inclusive art education, both in and outside formal school settings
  • To nurture your development as a reflective and autonomous professional practitioner who is able to identify strengths and areas for development in your subject knowledge and pedagogy, through evaluating current professional practice in relationship to developments in research and curriculum theory
  • To help you to meet The Professional Standards for Qualified Teacher Status (Ofsted, 2012) and thus be in a very good position to gain employment as a primary teacher able to specialize in art teaching

Each of these strands is developed throughout the module. Peer learning and teaching is a feature of the module, both by sharing strengths within the art specialist group and by providing support for fellow non-specialist students.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here - you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills1. identify and evaluate educational concepts and issues related to art and to engage in critical debate about current issues in art, drawing on evidence from theory, research and practice;
2. recognize pupils’ learning needs in art and interpret these learning needs in order to plan, teach, assess and evaluate lessons and schemes of work;
3. demonstrate confident academic and pedagogic subject knowledge to teach art in the primary phase of education;
4. demonstrate secure understanding of the statutory requirements of art in the National Curriculum;
5. demonstrate professional competence as specified by the Standards for the Award of Qualified Teacher Status;
Discipline-Specific Skills6. critically evaluate the relevance of learning theory to practice;
7. synthesize relevant educational literature in support of an argument;
8. use appropriate technologies for data handling and writing in education;
9. present data and findings in an appropriate form;
10. use research data in support of an argument in education;
Personal and Key Skills11. manage your own learning development;
12. learn effectively and be aware of your own learning strategies;
13. express ideas and opinions, with confidence and clarity, to a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes;
14. work productively in different kinds of teams (formal, informal, project based, committee based etc); and
15. think creatively about the main features of a given problem and develop strategies for its resolution.