Arts and Cultural Education in a Challenging and Changing World

This book is motivated by questions of how arts and cultural education―like all other fields―are affected by and―together with other fields―can contribute to glocal developments, challenges, and shifts. However difficult the times, arts, and culture in educational contexts have the ambition to make a positive contribution and foster creativity, empathy, and inclusion to encourage critical change, innovation, and peace. But if arts and cultural education remains traditional, unchallenged, and exclusive, those ambitions for critical change towards more inclusive practices that dare to act and make a change in the world, run the risk of remaining utopian rhetoric. It is time for a critical self-examination and willingness to change powers and privileges also within arts and cultural education.

Against this background, this book presents brave research on arts and cultural education that offers insight into the conditions, contexts, effects of, and critical changes needed within arts and cultural education. It addresses our time’s great changes, challenges, and possibilities for innovation.

Tanja Klepacki works as an educational scientist at the Chair of Pedagogy with a Focus on Culture and Aesthetic Education at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, where she is also the Senior Researcher of the UNESCO Chair in Digital Culture and Arts in Education and the executive manager of the Chair’s Teacher Training Academy. Her fields of work include theoretical and empirical studies in the fields of aesthetic and cultural education, cultural transformation dynamics, cultural sustainability, and cultural resilience. Besides research and teaching, she is responsible for the management of the editorial office of the international, peer-reviewed, open access Journal for Research in Cultural, Aesthetic, and Arts Education (IJRCAAE). She is also the permanent representative of the UNESCO Chair in the Network of German UNESCO Chairs and in the European Network of Observatories in the Field of Arts and Cultural Education (ENO).

Edwin van Meerkerk is professor of Cultural Education at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He publishes on this subject as well as on cultural policy and higher education for sustainability in both open-access academic journals and for the wider public. He is also endowed professor of Social and Cultural Sustainability at ArtEZ University of the Arts and Leadership fellow in the Comenius Programme for Educational Innovation. In his research and teaching, he is driven by curiosity about how people give shape to their ideas about the value of art in practice. He does this, among other things, through his long-term research into the cooperation between art teachers and teachers in primary education within the framework of the national programme Quality Cultural Education. He is also concerned with the differences between policy and practice with regard to cultural entrepreneurship. He has worked with societal partners such as Oxfam on bridging arts and cultural education with global societal challenges. Currently, he is leading a project to implement sustainability in the widest sense of the concept in all bachelor’s programmes at Radboud University.

Tone Pernille Østern is professor in Arts Education with a focus on Dance at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She also holds a position as visiting professor in Dance Education in Contemporary Contexts at Stockholm University of the Arts. She is active as artist/researcher/teacher with a special interest in participatory arts, choreographic processes, inclusive and critical pedagogies, performative research, and post-qualitative inquiry. Practice-led research, a/ r/tography and educational design research have been important approaches in her research and supervision of master and PhD students. She is project leader of the How to do things with disability research group from 2024, and international advisor of the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland funded research and development project Scenkonst med i lærande (SMIL) (Performing arts as part of learning) (2023–2026). She is Editor-in-chief for the peer-reviewed journal Dance Articulated.