A critical review of the content, methods and assessment of junior secondary art curriculum of Hong Kong schools

Visual arts should be recognized both as a subject with unique artistic content and as a discipline embedded with a series of dynamic, integrative and interactive experiences across the school curriculum. To be fully educated, students must be able to draw on aesthetic experiences and artistic knowledge as a means of understanding both themselves and the world around them. To become some highly innovative and productive members of the future workforce, the school graduates will find their exposure to art during their adolescent years useful and rewarding, so they may live with a pluralistic view on our increasingly multimedia and multicultural society. For many years, the study of art in Hong Kong schools had been suffering from the lack of appropriate balance between the more vigorous subjects and the more expressive disciplines like the visual arts. Art has always been considered an “ill-structured” domain where concepts vary from one application to another and art educators fail to provide “hard evidence” of student learning. Since curriculum policy-making has always been influenced by the authoritative allocation of competing values, the field of study in art at the junior secondary level remains to struggle for justifications on its rationale, supporting resources and contribution to the whole-person approach to education. To critically review and analyse the content, teaching methods and assessment of the art curriculum, this author has undertaken the research methods as follows: (1) Documentary and content analysis of the three leading syllabuses on Art & Design for secondary level produced by the Education Department in 1960, 1975 and 1997. (2) Classification and analysis of art content included in the syllabuses in terms of the basic and enrichment functions of the curriculum as well as the structured and unstructured implementation of the curriculum. (3) Comparison of teaching methodologies adopted at different time periods in Hong Kong toward the teaching of art and visual arts. (4) Investigation of assessment methods of art learning and evaluation of art teaching in schools. (5) Suggestions and recommendations based on the above study, available resources and the impact on the changing society of Hong Kong. Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.