By Laura Barraclough
Who created the Big Landscape project?
The Big Landscape Project was created by the NSEAD Better Practice Special Interest Group (SIG) ( 2019) to explore ways in which they can support art educators in delivering and embedding a creative and innovative art, craft and design curriculum.
What is the Big Landscape?
The NSEAD (National Society for Education in Art and Design) have announced the launch of The Big Landscape website – a digital ‘atlas’ that showcases the breadth and scope of art, craft and design, basing their work on 3 key questions: What? Why? and How? It provides teachers with a resource that enables them to review and adapt their current curriculum to meet the needs of their learners, in their specific context/ setting.
Aims of the Big Landscape
The big landscape aims to provide a comprehensive knowledge bank and framework to support curriculum design and professional development for art, craft and design teachers. The group analysed a variety of planning sources, models, schemes and guidance that were published nationally and looked for commonalities of practice between them. They found that sometimes, the prescribed nature of planning in the art curriculum sometimes devalued curiosity and some art projects became formulaic and stagnant. (NSEAD President Elect Andy Ash)
Why was the Big Landscape set up?
Due to the National Curriculum document for Art being quite vague- there is no set artist list, no commonly agreed model of skills and no essential knowledge progression or techniques outlined – teachers need to ask themselves these questions when beginning to plan the Art curriculum: What are we teaching? Why are we teaching the things we teach? And how does the way we teach it result in better learning outcomes? The Big Landscape project aims to address these questions. The team at NSEAD quickly identified a key priority that was to define and build guidance for teachers to make a better curriculum design, pedagogy and learning approaches that would be of practical use to teachers and practitioners. Members of the NSEAD have full included access to The Big Landscape toolkit, however resources are available for non- members.
Click the link to find out more or sign up for resources at: https://www.nsead.org/resources/the-big-landscape/
