Page 6 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 and 10: The Arts, 2010

THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 9 AND 10 | The Arts
learn that people use the arts to record, celebrate, and pass on to future generations their personal and collective stories and the values and traditions that make us unique as Canadians.
Education in the arts involves students intellectually, emotionally, socially, and physically. Learning through the arts therefore fosters integration of students’ cognitive, emotional, sensory, and motor capacities, and enables students with a wide variety of learning styles to increase their learning potential. For example, hands-on activities can challenge students to move from the concrete to the abstract, and the students learn that, while the arts can be enjoyable and fulfilling, they are also intellectually rigorous disciplines. Students also learn that artistic expression is a creative means of clarifying and restructuring personal experience.
In studying the arts, students learn about interconnections and commonalities among the arts disciplines, including common elements, principles, and other components. Dance and drama share techniques in preparation and presentation, and require interpretive and movement skills. Music, like dance, communicates through rhythm, phrase structure, and dynamic variation; also, both have classical, traditional, and contemporary compositional features. The visual arts, dance, and drama all share aspects of visual design, interpretation, and presentation, making connections among movement, space, texture, and environment. Media arts can incorporate and be interwoven through the other four disciplines to enhance, reinterpret, and explore new modes of artistic expression.
Links can also be made between the arts and other disciplines. For example, symmetry
in musical structure can be related to mathematical principles. Mathematics skills can
be applied to drafting a stage set to scale, or to budgeting an arts performance. Students taking a history course can attempt to bring an event in the past to life by reinterpreting it in their work in drama. Because all the arts reflect historical, social, and cultural contexts, students taking history, geography, and social sciences can gain insights into other cultures and periods through studying the arts of those cultures and times. Arts students can also apply their knowledge of historical and cultural contexts to enhance their understanding and appreciation of works of art. Dance students can make use of scientific principles of physical motion in their choreography.
The courses described in this document prepare students for a wide range of challenging careers in the arts, as well as careers in which they can draw upon knowledge and skills acquired through the arts. Students who aspire to be writers, actors, musicians, dancers, painters, or animators, for example, are not the only ones who can benefit from study
of the arts. Arts education prepares students for the fast-paced changes and the creative economy of the twenty-first century. Learning through the arts develops many skills, abilities, and attitudes that are critical in the workplace – for example, communication and problem-solving skills; the ability to be creative, imaginative, innovative, and original; the ability to be adaptable and to work with others; and positive attitudes and behaviours.
For example, participation in arts courses helps students develop their ability to listen and observe, and thus to develop their communication and collaborative skills. It encourages students to take risks, to solve problems in original ways, and to draw on their resourceful- ness. In arts courses, students develop their ability to reason and to think critically as well as creatively. They learn to approach issues and present ideas in new ways, to teach and persuade, to entertain, and to make designs with attention to aesthetic considerations. They also gain experience in using various forms of technology. In short, the knowledge
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