Units of Learning
This section presents a series of Units of Learning designed in alignment with the Junior and Senior Cycle Art Specifications. Each unit integrates the key strands and elements—Art, Craft and Design, Visual Culture and Appreciation, and Art Elements and Design Principles—while promoting student voice, personal meaning-making, and technical skill acquisition. Planning is informed by learning outcomes, Features of Quality, and principles of Assessment for Learning (AfL). The units support students in developing creative and critical thinking, while engaging with a range of processes including drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and digital media.
Junior Cycle
Extreme Foreshortening:
Mixed Media Works Exploring Student Perspectives on School
Students created mixed media artworks featuring a foreshortened figure in tonal graphite, contrasted against a mood-oriented background in a medium of choice. Together, the works express personal feelings about the school environment through body language, composition, and atmosphere.
From Packaging to Print:
Exploring Personal Growth through Tetra Park Printmaking
Students explored personal growth through sustainable printmaking utilising monoprint, calligraphy and intaglio. Inspired by the schools commitment to biodiversity and the nurturing environment of the Geodome, students reflected on growth - both in nature and within themselves - through their creative processes. Each print and plate capture a self-selected area of growth, expressing personal journeys through the tactile, layered language of sustainable printmaking.
Caricature Characters:
Crafting Picasso inspired cardboard character structures
Students studied and analysed Picassos aesthetic styles with particular focus on his portraiture and Head of a Woman (Tete de femme) 1957. In developing an understanding of the unique elements of his art such as distorted forms and multifaceted perspectives, students experimented with self-representation through these lenses. Students translated their knowledge of caricatures, characterisation and Picassos' style into three-dimensional cardboard maquettes.
Adventures in Enormity:
Re-imagining the presence of the micro in a macro environment.
Students responded to stimuli that asked them to consider the potential worlds that emerge when viewed from the micro perspective. Through imaginative compositions, students transported micro figures into an environment where everyday objects and spaces are enormous in size using their imagination, manipulation and reconstruction. They explored the qualities of the everyday mundane and their potential to become worlds worth exploring.
Senior Cycle
The Materiality of Nature:
Design and Craft of Woodland Inspired Mobiles
Students individually designed and crafted decorative mobile sculptures inspired by their schools biodiverse woodland, with a particular emphasis on the materiality of nature. The mobiles were exhibited collectively as a single mobile installation, celebrating the diversity of natural forms and expressive materials. Students works embody both personal interpretations and the natural textures, movement and energy of the woodland space.
Data-Driven Dreams:
Exploring AI and Art through Refik Anadols' Machine Hallucinations
This unit was designed in response to advancing digital technologies in teaching and learning with an emphasis on digital media literacy, competence and creative practice. The unit proposed explores the concept of data-driven art through the lens of Refik Anadols' Machine Hallucinations:MoMo Dreams. Students will investigate how AI and data can be used to create art, critically engage with contemporary visual culture, and produce their own mixed media works using similar processes from Anadols Machine.