Research

Integrated Arts Curriculum at School Level – A Cultural Perspective This paper attempts to examine New Zealand arts education programmes, beginning with the primary through the secondary school curriculum, to search for the possibility of integrating the independent arts disciplines currently existing in the schools. A learner-centred interactive interdisciplinary pedagogy is intended to draw a paradigm for arts education that has two similar, yet different, integrating points of inception. One is rooted in the indigenous concept of the art form embedded in cultures like those of Africa and Asia, while the other is identified in the modern educational psychoanalytical theory of multiple intelligences proposed by Howard Gardener. Parallel kinds of integration are found in these two approaches – either between the disciplines or within an individual’s intellectual development. Interestingly, it is clear that these two approaches, integrated into a curriculum, would enable a disci