The Australian Curriculum: The Arts

Learning in Visual Arts involves students making and responding to artworks, drawing on the world as a source of ideas. Students engage with the knowledge of visual arts, develop skills, techniques and processes, and use materials as they explore a range of forms, styles and contexts.
Through Visual Arts, students learn to reflect critically on their own experiences and responses to the work of artists, craftspeople and designers and to develop their own arts knowledge and preferences. They learn with growing sophistication to express and communicate experiences through and about visual arts.
Making in Visual Arts involves students making representations of their ideas and intended meanings in different forms. Students select the visual effects they want to create through problem-solving and making decisions. They develop knowledge, understanding and skills as they learn and apply techniques and processes using materials to achieve their intentions in two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional (4D) forms.
Responding in Visual Arts involves students responding to their own artworks and being audience members as they view, manipulate, reflect, analyse, enjoy, appreciate and evaluate their own and others’ visual artworks.
Both Making and Responding involve developing practical and critical understanding of how the artist uses an artwork to engage audiences and communicate meaning.
(http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/thearts/learning-in-visual-arts)