2014! Year of the Horse – and the Course!

STAY UP TO DATE WITH YOUR TEACHING!

Don’t forget to sign up for a visual arts workshop!

The new course starts next September for most Northern Hemisphere schools, and January 2015 for most Southern Hemisphere schools.

The last assessment for the current course is 2015 and the first examination session for the new course will be 2016. Time flies when you are having fun.

There are (I estimate, some still to be confirmed) 40 IB DP visual arts workshops between now and December 2014. Go here and check them out.

Six of the forty are online, of which one (in January) is still about the current course: since students following this course will not be examined until 2015 it’s reasonable that there is still one (final) opportunity for training teachers about the soon-to-be ‘old’ course.

The remaining online workshops all run for four weeks.

The other workshops are all face-to-face, with  locations including Detroit, Melbourne, Helsinki Istanbul, Mumbai, Toronto, Singapore, Dubai and Atlanta – and (a particular favourite of mine) the artist’s paradise that is St Pierreville, nestling in the hills and valleys, and the hot Ardennes sunshine, of July in the South of France (lower two images taken from the workshop last summer).

And what of the new course?

There will inevitably be some who resist the changes and some who feel we don’t need to change.

But I think we do.

OK, we may have learned to live with and even love the 2009 version of visual arts, but it wasn’t perfect, it was showing its age, and hey, change is a good thing.

Is the new course an improvement? I think so. But it will take some getting used to and there are some quite significant differences.

All of which makes your participation in a workshop – either face to face or online – a really good idea.