Department Overview:
The teachers of the Burnaby North Visual and Performing Arts department are committed to giving students a well-rounded high school experience. We have an incredible variety of courses for you to consider. Explore this site to get an idea of the breadth of the experiences that we offer.
Creativity is the key to education for the future. Most of the jobs that students will be applying for in ten years will be in fields that could not now even be dreamed of.
There is more to it though, when you start to look. It comes down to a question of educating the heart. Margaret Atwood put it well in her 2004 Kesterton Lecture: The “Arts, as we’ve come to term them, are not a frill. They are the heart of the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our technological inventiveness is generated by our emotions, not by our minds. A society without the arts would have broken its mirror and cut out its heart. It would no longer be what we now recognize as human.”
The VPA department also offers many extra-curricular and club opportunities that often ,become the most memorable experiences. As the artist Roy Lichenstein said, “Art doesn’t transform, it just plain forms”
To read more about our courses, print our PDF pamphlet or select one of the links below: