Session Information
15 SES 09 A, National Partnership Initiatives
Paper Session
Contribution
Education systems around Europe are characterized by regional disparities. With regard to cultural and arts education, for example, structurally strong regions and cities in Germany have experienced a revival in recent years, while the issue has often been neglected in rural regions (e.g. Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2018).Against this background, the question of what role cultural education plays in rural areas with regard to the efforts to achieve equal educational opportunities is of particular importance. As part of a meta-project, which monitors over 20 research projects on this topic, empirical and theoretical findings on the contents, subjects, underlying conditions and social dimensions of cultural education in rural areas are systematized and integrated into an overarching scheme in order to answer this question.As some studies have shown, arts education and cultural education can promote participation in society and strengthen community life (e.g. Thomson et al. 2015). According to some, arts education venues, agencies and practitioners help integrate people from diverse backgrounds into participation in social, cultural, and even political processes, for example by making music together (Skyllstad 2007) or by working collaboratively on art projects (Dietrich and Wischmann 2016). Especially in the context of rural areas and in view of the structural changes and challenges that many rural regions and communities in Europe face, political and civil society actors hope to strengthen inclusive capacities through cultural education as a central element of a community-oriented cultural policy (Keuchel and Werker 2020).In contrast to research on arts education (Liebau et al. 2014; Jörissen et al. 2018) or cultural education (Hauge 2014; Jessop 2017) in general, there are only few empirical studies that deal explicitly with the opportunities and challenges in rural areas. The topic has rarely been addressed by theoretically informed empirical research (Keuchel 2013), while, at the same time, demands are increasing to strengthen cultural education as a socially inclusive element in structurally weak regions (e.g. Sievers 2018).A systematic review (Petticrew and Roberts 2006) of publications in the field provides the foundation for further systematization of expected research findings. The literature review is combined with an analysis of existing quantitative data in order to better categorize more general conditions of this educational field. The paper will present initial key findings and discusses some methodological and epistemological issues, such as the application of a mixed methods design and the theoretical synthesis of divergent conceptions of cultural education. The presentation aims at answering the following questions:What does the existing literature and data tell us about cultural education and arts education in rural areas? Which opportunities and challenges can be identified? In doing so, the paper develops first steps toward answering the question of what significance cultural education approaches can have as part of the efforts to achieve equal educational opportunities.
Method
The metaproject uses a sequential mixed methods design (Onwuegbuzie und Burke 2006; Kappauf and Kolleck 2018) which draws on qualitative and quantitative research methods. For a systematic literature review (Petticrew and Roberts 2006), literature was collected using different databases, such as ERIC (U.S. Dept. Of Education). At first, several search terms were used. The most relevant literature was found with the general search terms “cultural education AND rural areas” and “arts education AND rural areas”. The search was then extended with further keywords. In a next step, literature for the review has been selected by drawing on further exclusion and inclusion criteria. For example, publications solely presenting normative concerns or policy instructions have been eliminated. Quantitative analysis is employed on different existing data sets that contain relevant information on arts education and cultural education in rural areas. Starting with data from longitudinal studies and broad studies from the social sciences, we investigate gaps and possibilities of quantitative data sets for the analysis of cultural education in rural areas. Further data with an origin in other fields and with a more specific focus on cultural education will be considered in a second step.
Expected Outcomes
Preliminary findings in conducting a systematic review show that, especially in Germany, there has been little empirical research on arts education or cultural education and their role in rural areas. Publications often solely focus on descriptions of educational projects or on formulating guidelines for cultural policy. In addition to art-related approaches, there is a strong tradition of so-called sociocultural education (Kegler 2020), which combines community-oriented approaches with aesthetic-artistic approaches. Our analysis indicates that, on the one hand, there are very high expectations from the cultural policy side regarding the role and performance of cultural education in connection with the aspects outlined before. On the other hand, educational projects and institutions face numerous structural problems, especially in the non-formal education sector, and high expectations cannot always be met. Institutions, projects and actors often rely heavily on formal and informal networks and collaborative cooperation. In the analysis of available data sets, we find that cultural education is to a large extent operationalized only in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital or sociocultural education. Starting from a very detailed query for institutionalized, objectified and embodied cultural capital to number of visits to cultural institutions, the items nonetheless remain stuck in a dichotomy of highbrow and popular culture. Besides sociocultural types of programs as operationalized in items regarding association membership or extracurricular courses as included in some of the surveys analyzed, open ended questions could provide more insights to participation in various types of cultural education programs. Another problem we face is that arts education and cultural education are usually used as umbrella terms for quite different subjects and objectives in diverse areas of education. This is further complicated by the circumstance that the German notion of ‘kulturelle Bildung’ does not per se differentiate between arts education and cultural education.
References
Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung (2018): Bildung in Deutschland 2018. Ein indikatorengestützter Bericht mit einer Analyse zu Wirkungen und Erträgen von Bildung. Bielefeld: Bertelsmann Verlag. Dietrich, Cornelie; Wischmann, Anke (2016): Kulturarbeit in regionalen Bildungslandschaften. Ein Fallvergleich zwischen England und Deutschland. In: Zeitschrift für Sozialpädagogik 14 (1), S. 17–37. Hauge, Chelsey (2014): Youth media and agency. In: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 35 (4), S. 471–484. Jessop, Sharon (2017): Adorno: Cultural Education and Resistance. In: Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (4), pp. 409–423. Jörissen, B.; Klepacki, L; Wagner E. (2018): Arts Education Research. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kappauf, Zola; Kolleck, Nina (2018): Vertrauen im Bildungsverbund. In: Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 21 (5), S. 1045–1062. Kegler, Beate (2020): Soziokultur in ländlichen Räumen. Die kulturpolitische Herausforderung gesellschaftsgestaltender Kulturarbeit. München: kopaed. Keuchel, Susanne (2013): Empirische kulturelle Bildungsforschung – Methodik, Themen und aktueller Forschungsstand. In: KULTURELLE BILDUNG ONLINE: https://www.kubi-online.de/artikel/empirische-kulturelle-bildungsforschung-methodik-themen-aktueller-forschungsstand (13.01.2020) Keuchel, Susanne; Werker, Bünyamin (Hrsg.) (2020): Gesellschaftspolitische Dimensionen der Kulturellen Bildung. Bielefeld: Transcript. Liebau, E.; Jörissen, B. (2013): Forschung zur kulturellen Bildung in Deutschland seit 1990. Erlangen: Projektbericht. Onwuegbuzie, Anthony; Johnson, R. Burke (2006): The Validity Issue in Mixed Research. In: Research in the Schools 13 (1), S. 48–63. Petticrew, M.; Roberts, H. (2006): Systematic reviews in the social sciences: A practical guide. Oxford: Blackwell. Sievers, Norbert (2018): Kulturpolitik für ländliche Räume. In: KULTURELLE BILDUNG ONLINE: https://www.kubi-online.de/artikel/kulturpolitik-fuer-laendliche-raeume (13.01.2020) Skyllstad, K. (2007): Music in peace education and conflict transformation: Nordic per-spective. In: Bresler, L. (Ed.): International handbook of research in arts education. Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, pp. 1053-1054. Strauss, Anselm L.; Corbin, Juliet M. (1996): Grounded theory. Grundlagen qualitativer Sozialforschung. Weinheim: Beltz. Thomson, P.; Barrett, A.; Hall, C.; Hanby, J.; Jones, S. (2015): Arts in the community as a place-making event. In: Fleming, M.; Bresler, L.; O’Toole, J. (Eds.): The Routledge interna¬tional handbook of the arts and education. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 295-304.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.