With "Sustainability in Art Education Fields of Practice", we describe and analyse extracurricular formats of art mediation and art education from the perspective of sustainability and its multiple liars in order to develop them further or to think them anew.
With "Sustainability in Art Education Fields of Practice", we describe and analyse extracurricular formats of art mediation and art education from the perspective of sustainability in order to develop them further or to think them anew. We consider environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainability. This includes issues such as access to education, urban development, climate protection, equity, diversity, body and health.
In cooperation projects and partnerships, as research and as practice based action research, we investigate the potential and the meaning of Art Education for sustainability und thereby develop the understanding of art mediation. Because knowledge in Art Education simultaneously is activated through theory as well as through art and the body, it represents a pertinent field for interrogations around sustainability.
Art mediation in cultural participation involves an interplay between current local and global social challenges and creative activity. From a researcher’s perspective, we engage in practice-oriented theatre, art and design based formats about cultural participation. We are interested to actively counter stereotypes, normative discourses, representations and stories of "us and the other" through arts and knowledge based questioning and to develop alternatives. An intervention to sensitize follows two directions: to develop strategies going beyond the dichotomy of "us" and "the other"; and a consciousness about access to art (i.e. dimensions of art practice, art education and artistic practice), and about inaccessibility for people experiencing classism, racism, and ableism. Art mediation contributes to cultural participation by broadening fields of action and increasing accessibility for groups marginalized so far. Thereby, it also prepares the ground for a democratization of the art field.
Diversity in Art and Education implies engaging with an intersectional perspective to interrogate power relations. 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 concept 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 “institutional normativity”, but also initiating change in the sense of a continuous dialogue and a democratization of processes. The research into diversity at art schools includes interdisciplinary approaches and points beyond its own disciplinary anchoring by incorporating its findings into the development of feminist-postcolonial, critical and anti-discriminatory theory.