As students at Westside begin to select the courses these two weeks, Westside Wired is going to preview a different department each day. The Westside Wired staff hopes to help educate students on the changes within each department and also highlight less-known classes. 

Within Westside’s art department, there are a plethora of classes to take that tailor and suit individual artistic needs, all depending on which medium a student chooses to pursue throughout high school.

One starting point for all artists, except pottery students, is Art Foundations. This school year and beyond, Art Foundations will be the prerequisite for all other art courses except for any pottery courses. Art department head and art foundations instructor Erin Lunsford explains the logic and reasoning behind making art foundations a prerequisite.

“We really want all of our students to start there to really learn the fundamentals of art and what we [the art department] are all about,” Lunsford said.

As far as new classes go, the art department hasn’t any new courses to the curriculum since Pottery 3, which Lunsford helped develop. Although four years ago, the 2D and 3D courses (AP 2D Design Portfolio, AP 3D Design and AP Drawing Portfolio) became AP certified. Lunsford talks about aligning curriculum to fit with AP’s.

“The classes themselves had been around before, but we just got the AP endorsement,” Lunsford said. “The content of what we’ve been teaching [in those classes] hasn’t really changed at all. What we were already doing aligned almost perfectly with what the AP College Board required.”

Concerning the difficulty of getting the endorsement, Lunsford had to jump through some hoops.

“I had to go through a pretty long process of developing a syllabus for all three AP courses that would be acceptable and approved by the College Board,” Lunsford said. “It took a little bit of time.”

And with a class like Graphic Design, currently only available to seniors, Lunsford is toying around with the idea of opening it up to juniors.

“It [Graphic Design] has always kind of been that second semester, senior-level class that kind of compliments the AP art classes, but we’re thinking about opening it up to juniors,” Lunsford said.

The art department has multiple classes to help students grow as artists. Senior Casey Callahan, who has been an art student throughout her entire high school tenure, gave her reason as to why taking art classes has been beneficial to her.

“Practice is everything,” Callahan said. “Practicing art over and over helps you develop your own style. Taking art classes every year has helped me discover new ways of doing things as well as furthering my techniques with things I am already familiar with.”

This was the preview to the art department at Westside. Here is the preview to the computer science department. Check in tomorrow for a preview on the English department.