In school the arguments centre about the kinds of knowledges needed for the 21st century and the ways didactics should be shaped in order to enable students to achieve them. At the same time as many governments call for greater accountability and therefore more data based reporting from teachers, national curricula are being redeveloped in terms of knowledge and skills that are not so readily quantifiable. Curriculum innovations are calling for greater breadth and depth, personalisation and choice and relevance (e.g. Curriculum for Excellence 2008; The New Zealand Curriculum 2007; Hong Kong Creative Education Report 2006). They also increasingly call for education to involve more creativity, as reported by O’Farrell, Sæbø, McCammon, Heap (2009). Existing practice and theory in arts pedagogy already incorporates many of the principles, values and processes that are being called for across the curriculum (e.g. Heathcote 2008; Millar and Saxton 2004; Greenwood 2005; Greenwood and Wilson 2006). However, for many policy makers the arts are still seen as adjuncts to curriculum rather than as tools for achieving a broad range of curriculum goals. This paper examines the alignment between the concepts and practices of education in and through the arts and the intentions of a range of curriculum documents that are currently heralded as innovative. It then proposes a critical alignment between education through the arts (as opposed to education about the arts) and the intentions of emerging curriculum documents that are founded on principles of inquiry, development and creativity and that state an expectation for the fostering of values such as repect for diversity, equity, quest for excellence, inquiry, ecological sustainabilty, participation in community. The alignment is ‘critical’ because there is nothing magical about the use of the arts as tools for learning. They simply provide a palette of strategies to provoke learning: such as, for example, role, framing, image shaping and deconstrction, change of perspective, manipulation of tension, physicalisation and group process. What makes a diffrence is the extent to which the teacher understand the tools, understands the richness of the curricular possibilities, and develops and utilises stratgies for learning..

The work is based on a critical analysis of discourse and concepts in the curriclum documents, and maps the results against a similar analysis of reports of education through the arts. It then examines the potential of the methodological tools involved in one particular branch of education through the arts – that through drama- to achieve the goals the planned goals. As such the paper is both theoretical and research-based. It draws on a number of previously published reports of cases studies (some by the author, some by others) of teaching in and through the art, re-analysing them in terms of the discourse and concepts of the curriculum documents. In particular, it examines how arts-based learning involves generating ideas, communicating, interpreting, negotiating the relationship between form and meaning, relationship with and understanding of context. It also addresses the elusive notions of ‘aesthetic learning’ and ‘learning in the body’.

The conclusions of the study offer a potentially two-fold contribution to our knowledge of learning and curriculum. It offers a platform for examining the learning that occurs through deliberate art-based pedagogies, and aligning it with the expected outcomes of a number of ‘new’ curricula. It also allows us to consider how the processes used in the arts may be adapted and utilised in other curriculum learning areas in order to facilitate the goals of the curriculum (Greenwood 2002; Greenwood & McCammon, 2008; Sutherlin & Greenwood, 2008; Anderson, M, 2006), and the goal of the building a whole person with the deamands of accountability through assessment. One of the particularlities of learning through the arts is that it deliberately crosses domains: drawing eclectically and integratively on different subject fields. It thus provides a possible way of approaching cross- curricular learning, and of evaluating its potenatial benefits.