COURSE DESCRIPTION
The central questions in this course include the following: What is art and how is it made? Why and how does art change? How do we describe our thinking about art? Through these essential questions, students explore the big ideas of AP® Art History, effectively and precisely articulating an artwork’s meaning and function, its maker’s methods, and the ways it reflects and affects its historical and cultural contexts. With these core questions as the foundation, this course is organized into 10 chronological units, emphasizing daily practice of questioning techniques, methods of discussion, analytical paradigms, guided discovery, and independent learning. These enable our students to develop criticalthinking and visual literacy skills with which they can mine meaning from any artwork they encounter throughout their lives.
CHAPTERS
Unit 1: Global Prehistory, 30,000–500 BCE
Unit 2: Ancient Mediterranean, 3500 BCE–300 CE
Unit 3: Early Europe and Colonial Americas, 200–1750 CE
Unit 4: Later Europe and Americas, 1750–1980 CE
Unit 5: Indigenous Americas, 1000 BCE–1980 CE
Unit 6: Africa, 1100–1980 CE
Unit 7: West and Central Asia, 500 BCE–1980 CE
Unit 8: South, East, and Southeast Asia, 300 BCE–1980 CE
Unit 9: The Pacific, 700–1980 CE
Unit 10: Global Contemporary, 1980 CE to Present
COURSE OBJECTIVES
The curricular requirements are the core elements of the course. A syllabus must provide explicit evidence of each requirement based on the required evidence statement(s). The Unit Guides and the “Instructional Approaches” section of the AP ® Art History Course and Exam Description (CED) may be useful in providing evidence for satisfying these curricular requirements.
