Panel j.02 — Art Education and social justice: New ways for the development of democracy
Convenors Alessia Rosa (INDIRE, Italy); Claudia Chellini (INDIRE, Italy); Marco Morandi (INDIRE, Italy)
Keywords art education, democracy, active citizenship skills, social justice
Today, we are witnessing an antithetical development of art education that may influence the cultural development of future society.
On the one hand in many educational systems, the study of the arts is decreasing in the curricula leading to potentially disastrous consequences for our communities (Quinn, Ploof, Hochtritt, 2011).
On the other hand, artistic educational contents are developed in cross-cutting ways by supporting and integrating with different disciplines. This conceptualisation can aid our understanding of democratic learning and our ability to provide opportunities for it through art and educational practice (McDonnell J.,2014). In fact, this way Art Education curricula can form, as in the intentions of the artistic education of the seventeenth century, the mindful habit of an informed citizenry that fashions an art of living by constructively re-imagining new possibilities of democratic community and empathetic understanding (Siegesmund,2013). In particular many researches (Capous-Desyllas, Morgaine, 2018) underline how creativity, when supported through education can instigate social change.
In this panel, we are interested in discussing and confronting on the evolution of the field of art education by moving beyond the dominant discipline-based art education (DBAE), and expressive culture paradigms, by defining examples of art education that are engaged with context (the teacher and students’ surroundings) contemporary art (current forms and perspectives) and critical social issues.
To foster and enrich the international debate revolving around art education future here we call for theoretical, methodological, and empirical elaborations. Basing on this aim, we welcome contributions related (but not limited to) to the following issues:
- Reflections on how art can be used to promote democratic citizenship.
- Methodologies to investigate how the arts can support active citizenship skills
- Strategies for enhancing artistic content in school curricula
- Experiences of transversal artistic educational proposals
- Analysis of the relationship between creativity, education and social change
- Reflection about the tension between the Art Education, focusing on professional skills and techniques, and Aesthetic Education that focuses on appreciation of objects.
- Analysis of how artistic languages can become resources for inclusive and democratic education