Art and History: Justifying the Links

Introduction

History and Art have been taught as traditional subjects for many years and as cross curricular subjects they compliment each other beautifully. I do not see how we can realistically completely separate them given that so much of the evidence we use, with younger or SEN children in particular, are visual images of one kind or another. Sight is one of our major senses so we need to develop its use wherever possible. However we must be able to justify this traditional alignment in terms of the historical skills and/or the artistic skills our children are developing - this was the problem during the era of ‘topic' work during the 1970s and 80s and we need to be careful not to repeat these mistakes. We need to be wary of trying to achieve too much.

"The fewer the curriculum subjects represented within a single theme, the more teachers are able to help raise subject standards and ensure curriculum progression and coverage" (Barnes, p. 71).

Combining two subjects like history and art therefore seems a good place to start.