Sustainability in Art Education Fields of Practice

In the research area "Sustainability in Art Education Fields of Practice," we interrogate and analyse formats of art mediation and art education from the perspective of sustainability. We thereby develop them โ€“ both, understandings of sustainbility and approaches to Art Education โ€“ further and think them anew. This includes issues such as access to education, urban development, climate protection, equity, body and health. Environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainability are part of our enquiries.
We investigate the potential and the meaning of Art Education for sustainability in cooperation projects and partnerships, as research or as practicebased action research. Our goal is to broaden the sphere of activity of art mediation and the discourse around sustainability: By taking considerations around social equity as a starting point and by adopting approaches, methods and experiences of Art Education, we try to come to terms with diversity and equal opportunities, with power-relations and regimes of privilege. Thereby, we contribute to a wholesome, versatile and nuanced understanding of sustainbability as well as its mode of working and its temporality. Because in Art Education, knowledge is produced and activated simultaneously through theory, art, and the body, Art Education represents a pertinent field for interrogations around sustainability. Furthermore, our aim is to contribute to the theorization of Art Education and sustainability and to show how theory always is entangled with practice.

Latest

International Symposium "Critical Sustainability?"

Project "Recht auf Wir" [Right for We]

Project "Tiny Food Forest" (for English see below)

(See also: Platform by re-sources ZHdK: Growing Sustainability in the Arts)

Research

The current research activities can be divided into the following areas.

  • Cultural participation and social change

    What is the contribution and the responsibility of artistic knowledge-based practice in achieving the deconstruction of stereotyping discourses, images, and the stories of distinctions between โ€œusโ€ and โ€œthemโ€? To enable a sense of โ€œweโ€ and togetherness in different contexts, we need to engage open processes of negotiation. Although cultural infrastructures are accessible to many โ€“ they are public โ€“ their framing, conditioning and processes of constitution remain opaque and therefore rarely are part of the negotiation. This produces exclusion. An open, diversity-sensitive negotiation of collective identities and collective space is crucial: Where are they fostered, how are they imagined, how institutionalized, and how can they become a part of the collectivity on the long term? And also: when are they becoming exclusionary themselves and why? Moreover, the interrogation of institutional processes and the investigation of structural normativities are fundamental for these kinds of inquiries.

    Within the current situation in Switzerland, these processes and practices have to be self-reflexively encouraged in the field of arts and culture. Within drama, performance, art and design-based formats, the consideration of anti-discriminatory education, postcolonial, feminist and postmigrant perspectives, as well as knowledge on racism, sexism, classism, and ableism and their intersectional workings is needed. The dichotomy between โ€œweโ€ and โ€œthe Othersโ€ has to be questioned through sensitizing interventions that allow for developing strategies towards countering the regimes of exclusivity around art and design; i.e. artistic spaces, arts education and artistic practices, etc.. By applying a multi-perspective research and practice-based questioning, we are interested to look into the transfer or translation of knowledge, expertise and experience via artistic forms and methods and how for instance they allow for establishing a public through haptic appropriations by rendering insights more broadly accessible. Furthermore, knowledge as practice and the transfer of theory into action are important tools of empowerment.

    โ†’  More information on ยซTiny Food Forest as an artistic-based and existential practiceยป
          (funded by Sustainability Dossier)
    โ†’  More information ยซRight for We (2022-2025)ยป
    โ†’  More information on ยซInterweave (2021)ยป (funded by International Dossier)

  • Diversity in art education

    National, ethnic and cultural coding regarding learning and educational processes in the field of art schools favour the reproduction of a white, patriarchal and bourgeois conception of art and culture. Recognising the impact of this constitutes the point of departure for researching diversity and its intersectional overlapping. This does not just mean demonstrating the functions of an โ€œinstitutional normativityโ€, but also initiating change in the sense of a continuous dialogue and a democratization of processes. The previously led research project โ€œArt.School.Differencesโ€ (2014โ€“2016) provides important insights on diversity in art education. Its findings and research design has enabled a multitude of further initiatives. To further these interrogations about diversity in art education, a more systematic questioning of teachings, curriculum, study structures, relationships between educated and educators as well as institutional processes is needed. Collaborations between institutional and other activists, faculty and students, stakeholders and decisionmakers have to become part of a research-based development of Higher Education.

    The research into diversity at art schools includes interdisciplinary approaches and points beyond its own disciplinary anchoring. On one hand, the specificity of restricted study places allows for a nuanced assessment of processes of in- and exclusion that are applicable to Higher Education institutions in Switzerland in general but remain widely unintelligible. On the other hand, findings on diversity at art schools are valuable to be incorporated into the development of feminist-postcolonial, critical and anti-discriminatory theory.

    โ†’ Final study of โ€œArt.School.Differencesโ€
    โ†’ Project โ€œAddress! (2017-2019)โ€ Research project on the debate around participatory university development
    โ†’ Project โ€œBAE Teaching formats with and for refugees (2019)โ€ Research project on the dimensions of teaching and curriculum in considering diversity

  • Shape futures

    No entry in Englisch

  • Promotion of sustainable behaviour - with head, heart and hand

    No entry in Englisch

Team

Laura Hew, Sophie Vรถgele

Previous Teammembers:
Nadir Ak, Hรผseyin Bรผyรผktas, Michel Massmรผnster, Judith Tonner

Projects

  • Tiny Food Forest as an artistic-based and existential practice (2023)

    Meeting the challenge of appropriating space in the mode of cultural participation
    (funded by Sustainability Dossier)

    In this project we pursue an intervention into the public space by planning and initiating a forest garden (tiny food forest). Students from Zรผrich University of the Arts ZHdK and from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, sociocultural animation work together with experts in permaculture and antidiscrimination to develop the place and the format of a tiny food forest. They discuss and find ways, how cultural participation can counter inequality and discrimination, and how our understanding of sustainability is interrelated with questions around social equity and diversity. By bringing together theories, methods and practices, the setting will be interdisciplinary from the very beginning. Thereby, we aim at an artistic approach of gardening and at the question, of how the space that has been appropriated through gardening can be shared in a more sustainable way. Thus, the projects outset is directed beyond its duration: Just as the practice of gardening needs recurring anual cycles, getting in touch with the public and tying a social network at the crosspoints of public space, artistic practice and sustainability, will go on establishing itself thereafter.

  • ยซRight for Weยป (2022โ€“2025)

    Cultural participation as a critical practice of anti-discrimination in art- and educational institutions and in the public sphere

    โ€œRight for Weโ€ (2022-2025) focusses social in- and exclusions, power-relations and privileges within the realm of arts and culture, education and the public space. Through the implementation of practise-based projects in collaboration with organizations and communities, we aim for deliberations of diversity sensitive identities of a shared โ€œWeโ€. Throughout the project, we will assemble the findings in a publicly accessible, digital workbook.

    โ€œRight for Weโ€ is a cooperation of educators, researchers, and students from the ZHdK, the PH-FHNW, and the HSLU. It is partnered with Art of Intervention

    โ†’  More information ยซRight for Weยป

  • Interweave (2021)

    What is cultural participation? The role art, design and drama play for acquiring participatory modes and spaces in educational contexts.

    Unwind biographies, tie realities, bind people, blend contents.

    โ†’  More information on ยซInterweaveยป

  • Zukรผnfte gestalten (2019โ€“2021)

    How can future be aesthetically experienced within the practice of Art Education? What kinds of futures do diverse people and stakeholders imagine and undergo in a variety of situations? How can we possibly deal with the plurality of potential futures? And: What conclusions do we draw for educational settings and art mediators?

    โ†’  To the projects (only in German): โ†’ ยซZukรผnfte gestaltenยป and โ†’ ยซZukรผnfte der Art Educationยป

  • BAE Teaching Formats with and for Refugees

    Based on ongoing practical research in a refugee center, the project investigates the structures and criteria necessary for future teaching formats with and for refugees. On one hand, the findings are introduced to the course BA Art Education, with a focus on aesthetic education and the sphere of social culture, which plans to offer recurring teaching formats with refugees. On the other hand, the findings become embedded within the current discourse on art pedagogy. Thereby, the conditions and possibilities of cultural education and art mediation, situated between empowerment and limitations, change and affirmation, autonomy and subordination, are examined (more information here).

  • Address! Students with experiences of migration and non-normative education pathways in the BAE, ZHdK

    The Address! Project is about establishing measures for inclusion within the application and recruitment process of Bachelor of Art Education candidates at the ZHdK, working in close cooperation with the degree programme itself. The project was based on the fact that as a group, people who experience migration are under-represented among the students for this course. Qualitative interviews with students formed the basis for an analysis, which aimed to ask about specific strategies and areas for action, in order to make  productive changes within the development of the degree programme. Overall, it became apparent that many people are not sufficiently addressed by external communication and that there are a number of difficulties for students who do not conform to the standard kind of student at the ZHdK, particularly because individuals feel that they are the exception and  an isolated case. Furthermore, it also became clear that the commonly used identifying characteristic of โ€˜migrant backgroundโ€™, attributed by the majority, is always intersectional and closely interwoven with social background and gender, and can therefore have racist and classist impacts on interactions at the university. Based on the results of the data analysis, a workshop was held with faculty from the degree programme. In groups, they developed measures to facilitate access to relevant information, to adapt course structures and curricula and to reflect on their own teaching practice. In this context, new formats for examination and collective teaching formats were put forward, amendments to the curriculum as well as course assessment were developed and considerations were made as to how structures for student support and mentoring could be designed and established (for more information, see the blog entry at Art.School.Differences-Blog).