Autonomous Niche
In St Anthony’s Canossian Secondary School , our unique Performing Arts Education Programme (PfE) is anchored by a trinity of disciplines – Music, Dance and Drama. Faithful to our belief in the immense potential in each and every student, this programme is offered to all pupils in the first two years of their secondary schooling as a means of empowering them for life with a holistic approach to their education.
The Rationale behind The Choice: Performing Arts Education-Our Niche Area
An education in the arts
- Stimulates our students’ sense of imagination, intuition and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication.
- Enriches students’ experience and fosters skills and understanding that are transferable and beneficial to other areas of learning.
- Enables students to develop sensitivity to the world around them, cultivates the direct experience of the senses and stimulates students to perceive and think in a variety of ways.
- Develops their problem-solving abilities and thinking skills like analysing, synthesising and evaluating helps students identify, appreciate and deepen their understanding in the traditional art forms of our different ethnic communities and other national communities.
- Provides students with additional tools in learning to adapt to and respect other cultures, ways of thinking and working.
- Enables students to communicate thoughts and feelings in a variety of modes, giving them a wider and more powerful repertoire of self-expression.
Relative to the long history of Music and Visual Arts in the Singapore schools’ instructional curriculum, Dance and Drama Programmes have both been relatively recent additions to the core curricula in select secondary schools. By integrating the two dynamic Performing Arts programmes into the existing Music and Visual Arts components in the core curricula, we will not only be inculcating in our students a greater appreciation of the Arts in general, but also laying the foundation for pupils with different artistic talents with the use of differentiated programmes catering to the unique needs of every child.
The learning outcomes of the 3 disciplines in the Performing Arts Education are complimentarily interrelated. Thus, pursuing all 3 disciplines simultaneously provides students with an integrated education in the arts, bringing us closer to achieving our ultimate aim of a holistic education for each and every child.
The objective of PfE is for all the students in our school to be provided with the opportunities to reap and sow the benefits of a unique Arts learning experience. This is best accomplished through a structured curriculum within school hours sustained by varied modes of assessment that measure the level of both cognitive and effective development.
The constant revision and sustained development of the Performing Arts Education Programme as a niche area in St Anthony’s Canossian Secondary is clearly aligned with the School’s Mission of providing a holistic education for all our students.