How to Embed Art Careers Lessons into Your Curriculum
Do you deliver any art careers lessons or activities to your students?
An excellent art curriculum should include lessons and experiences that educate our students about the huge range of careers that an art education can lead to. This adds an extra layer of relevance for your students. Some students carry on with art at a higher level if they can see it leading to a job.
Below are some lessons and ideas to embed art careers lessons into your curriculum. Wouldn’t it be great if your students had these experiences over the years?
Visiting Professionals
Bringing in professionals can provide students with a unique perspective on different career paths in the arts and help them understand the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in these fields. Ask your students if any of their parents, guardians or relatives have creative careers and you may be able to make connections with web designers, graphic designers, illustrators or who knows what wonderful careers. Alternatively, look at the businesses in your area and contact them directly.
You may wish them to speak to your gifted and talented at lunchtime. Or they may be willing to repeat a talk to a number of classes over a morning. Or could they zoom a whole year group at a given time?
Reaching out to your alumni (if you have a network or maybe a Facebook page) is another strategy for bringing in speakers. Wouldn’t it be great for your students to see old girls and boys who have gone on to have successful careers in fashion, architecture or other art-related careers?
Set an Art Careers Homework (Year 6/7/8 or Grade 5/6/7)
This website has an ‘Art Careers‘ page, written in child-friendly language. Why not use it as a homework task for your students to start exploring art careers? It’s ideal as a first task to explore creative careers. For a lesson plan and worksheet to do just that, click on the image below.
Big List of Art Careers
Click on the image below to go to my big list of art careers written in child friendly language. Use this in conjunction with the homework above.
Researching Creative Careers Lesson (Year 8 or above or Grade 7 or above)
Build a lesson into your curriculum where students use the internet to research creative careers. This can be a great opportunity for discussion and they are certain to find careers they didn’t know existed. Run this every year with a particular year group. The lesson below builds on the homework task above by also looking at education and training requirements and salary.
Plan an Art Careers Assembly
Ask for volunteers who want to participate in an art careers assembly. Ask each student to research a particular art career. You might like to consider web designer, games designer, curator, illustrator, architect and fashion designer. If you read a brief introduction about the huge range of exciting and lucrative careers that art can lead to and maybe include some of the careers students from your school have gone on to do, and then each student aims to read for 2 minutes, you have yourself an assembly!
Why We Teach Art in Schools
Artist Patrick Brill, who goes by the pseudonym ‘Bob and Roberta Smith‘ is well known for championing the arts in the UK. This video is 4 and a half minutes long and is pure gold. It puts in simple terms why art should be taught in schools and mentions many careers.
If you built all of the above creative careers education into your curriculum, spreading them across the year groups that you teach, you would be providing an excellent insight into creative careers for your students.
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