A New Teacher's Guide to Teaching Vincent van Gogh (WA, SCSA-Aligned)

If you are early in your career and about to teach Vincent van Gogh for the first time in a Western Australian classroom, take a breath. This is one of the most forgiving topics in the Visual Arts, because students already have opinions about the work before you say a word. Your job is not to know everything about the man; it is to design a few clear lessons that meet the Western Australian Curriculum and set students up for the kind of responding they will do towards the WACE. Here is what to prioritise, the traps to sidestep, and a simple first lesson you can walk in and teach.

What to prioritise first

Resist the urge to cover his whole biography. Under the School Curriculum and Standards Authority (SCSA) framework, the Visual Arts strands of Making and Responding reward depth over coverage. For a Year 9 or Year 10 class, choose two or three works, teach students to look closely, and build a shared vocabulary for colour, mark and mood. Everything else can wait. A ready-made sequence like Vincent van Gogh – Colour and Expression saves you from building resources from scratch in your first term and keeps your focus on the two questions that matter: what did he do, and why does it move us?

Common traps for new teachers

Three traps catch most of us the first time:

• Leading with the ear story. It grabs attention, but it crowds out the art. Mention it briefly, then redirect to the paintings.
• Treating "expression" as vague. Give students concrete tools: thick versus thin paint, warm versus cool, the direction of a brushstroke. Expression becomes something they can point to.
• Skipping the making. Western Australian students learn Van Gogh best by trying his marks themselves, even for ten minutes with oil pastels.
• Assessing too early. Let students practise responding aloud before you ask for written analysis.

Underpinning all of this is colour, so it pays to be secure in the basics yourself. A quick refresh with Colour Theory – From Itten to Practical Application will help you explain why Van Gogh's yellows and blues feel so charged.

A simple first lesson

Here is a lesson you can teach with confidence:

1. Project The Starry Night with no title. Ask students to write three words for how it feels (two minutes).
2. Share words aloud and cluster them on the board.
3. Introduce three tools: brushstroke direction, colour temperature, and thickness of paint. Model spotting each one in the work.
4. Students return to the painting and find one example of each tool, linking it to a feeling word from earlier.
5. Ten-minute making task: recreate a small patch of sky using swirling oil-pastel marks.
6. Close with one sentence each: "Van Gogh made me feel ___ by ___."

That final sentence stem is quietly powerful. It rehearses the exact structure of a responding paragraph, linking effect to technique, which is precisely what SCSA responding tasks and later WACE ATAR and General courses ask students to do.

Looking ahead

Once students can talk about mark and colour with Van Gogh, they can transfer those skills to any artist. A natural next step is to contrast his emotional colour with a very different problem in form, which is where a resource such as Pablo Picasso – Cubism and Guernica earns its place. You are also quietly building the Personal and Social Capability and Critical and Creative Thinking general capabilities every time students defend an interpretation with evidence.

You do not need to be an expert to teach this well in Western Australia. Choose a few works, give students the tools to look, let them make, and let their own responses lead. The confidence will come, and so will theirs.

Related reading from the Teacher Hub

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• Scaffolding The Pythagorean Theorem for Students Who Need Support (WA, SCSA-Aligned)