Arts

At Pukekohe High School our students have the opportunity to be involved in learning and expressing themselves through Dance, Drama, and Music and the Visual Arts. 

Students have the opportunity to enrol in a short taster course in each of these four disciplines in Year 9.  For many students this will be the first time they have the opportunity to learn in a specialist environment with a specialist teacher.  Many students discover they have ability, potential, or a particular enjoyment of one or more of these Arts.  Students can select any one of these subjects in Year 10 as an option.  Year 10 courses provide an important foundation of skills and learning in a broad range of processes and activities.  From Year 11 onwards, the Arts courses start to become increasingly more specialised, and students will explore ideas and create works with more and more confidence and skill.  Within each, ākonga  (students) develop literacies as they build on skills, knowledge, attitudes, and understandings at each of the eight levels of the curriculum. 

Through Arts practices and the use of traditional and new technologies, students generate and refine ideas through cycles of action and reflection.  Arts education explores, challenges, affirms and celebrates unique artistic expressions of self, communities and cultures.  In the Arts ākonga learn to work independently and collaboratively to construct meanings, produce works, respond to and value others’ contributions. By actively participating and learning in the Arts students learn to take risks, grow thinking skills and use imagination to engage with unexpected outcomes and to explore multiple solutions. 

By participating in the Arts, the personal well-being of akonga is enhanced.  Arts education values the culture and experiences of all akonga and builds on these with increasing sophistication and complexity as their knowledge and skills develop. Learners develop their ability to view their world from new perspectives. Through the development of Arts literacies - as creators, performers and viewers - students go on to participate in, interpret, value, and enjoy the creative Arts throughout their lives. 

Learning in the Arts can lead on to many related job opportunities and careers in creative fields.  However the value of learning in the Arts goes well beyond this.  Students grow themselves and their competencies in all sorts of important and life-giving ways as they participate actively in learning, such as thinking skills, self-management, commitment, the ability to collaborate, connect with and respond to others, to imagine, take risks, investigate, problem-solve, research, observe, listen, reflect and create.  

Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

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