Schools Programmes

At City Gallery, we believe encounters with contemporary art can spark curiosity, stimulate creativity, and help us think deeply about the world we live in. Our aim is for students to experience the Gallery as a dynamic, stimulating learning environment where they feel engaged, challenged, and inspired. By visiting the Gallery and taking part in our education programmes, students can share their personal responses to artworks, increase their understanding of contemporary art, and

• build creative and critical thinking skills;
• develop visual literacy skills;
• experiment with a wide variety of art-making techniques;
• participate in open questioning, discussion, and debate.

Our programmes are created in response to the Gallery’s regularly changing exhibitions. They are led by trained visual-arts teachers, who draw on enquiry-based methodologies including Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and Philosophy for Children (P4C), and who employ a range of teaching strategies to engage multiple learning styles.

Supported by the Ministry of Education’s Enriching Local Curriculum (ELC) and developed to align with the New Zealand National Curriculum with a focus on visual art, our programmes regularly support other curriculum areas such as Art History, English, Social Studies, Dance, Science and Technology, and often feature collaborations with artists, dancers, and other specialist practitioners.