In times of uncertainty, global socio-economic challenges, demographic changes and pressure from hegemonic powers, everyday life is challenged by an increasing intolerance towards cultural diversity (Ferro, Wagner, Veloso, IJdens & Lopes, 2019), a tendency towards a normative majoritarian approach to cultural literacy (Morell, 2017), a lack of inclusion of cultural expressions represented by minoritised and marginalised groups (May & Sleeter, 2010). Furthermore, there is a lack of knowledge on how to strengthen cultural literacy in education, including good and best practices of how to further integrate it in both formal and non-formal settings (Desai, 2019).

Therefore, a critical cultural literacy approach is fruitful to go beyond ‘high culture’, because it includes within its scope a variety of cultural genres and repertoires from “below” such as street art, hip hop etc. and underlines, that the promotion of cultural literacy has to be understood as a process taking place in situated social interaction, as a dialogic and co-creative endeavour, shaped by power dynamics and structures: As critical cultural literacy is grounded in critical theory, it rests on the assumption “that an interplay of social ideologies and power relations works systematically to advantage some people while disadvantaging others” (Son, 2020, p. 308). So critical cultural literacy can no longer described as a neutral and individual cognitive or technical skill, but rather as a ‘socially situated practice’ (Rutten et al., 2013, p. 445).

Against this societal and theoretical backdrop, the paper presents and discusses preliminary findings from a literature review conducted as part of the EU Horizon project EXPECT_Art ("EXPloring and Educating Cultural Literacy through Art"). The paper focuses in particular on the findings regarding the state of art of cultural literacy and arts education in Germany and Denmark.

In Denmark, arts education has been shaped by the German tradition of Bildung and a Nordic tradition of craftsmanship. In recent years, arts education has developed according to two different societal trends. First, a trend towards perceiving arts education as means of generating entrepreneurship, which underpin a positive economic development in the global market. Secondly, a trend towards perceiving arts education as part of the solution to sustainability challenges (Kallio-Tavin, 2019). Finally, Denmark like the other Nordic countries “never went through a critique of colonialism” and “Nordic democracy does not yet include everybody living in the Nordic countries. Even the local minority cultures are not well represented in the national [arts] curricula” (Kallio-Tavin, 2019, p. 591). This makes Denmark an important context for exploring the potential of decolonisation arts education and education through art to develop critical cultural literacy.

In Germany, there is an urgent need for decolonisation of arts education (see Mörsch, 2021), which was recently underlined by a discourse-analytical study of 850 applications received within the framework of the “Kultur macht stark” and “Kultur macht stark plus” programmes funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In these applications, which were submitted for art projects in schools but also for informal learning settings (see Keuchel 2013 for a mapping of arts education in Germany), for example, the stereotypical addressing of refugees and the individualisation of social problems were reconstructed; furthermore, arts education was presented as a mediator of German, European and dominant cultural values, while children from migrant and socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds were denied their own biographical artistic and cultural experiences (Bücken et al., 2018; Baitamani et al., 2020). Nevertheless, arts education is seen as a powerful way to critically reflect on problematic understandings of culture and to motivate children, young people and adults to rethink social conditions, especially privilege and marginalisation and the construction of others (Battaglia & Mecheril, 2020).

The paper builds literature reviews conducted simultaneously, collaboratively and in a coordinated manner in two European countries. According to Newman and Gough (2019), a literature review involves the following steps: defining the review question and selection criteria, developing the search strategy (including the selection of search sources and databases as well as search terms), selecting inclusion and exclusion criteria, screening and coding studies, assessing their quality, and finally synthesising and reporting the results. The paper will then outline how the findings will help to inform the ongoing research process, particularly with regard to a participatory and community-based research approach.

In studying articles and materials with the topics of cultural literacy in relation to critical pedagogy, decoloniality, community-based research, and arts-based methods we would like to achieve and to develop methods of research which are crossing borders. These methods should in a decolonial way of social research be brave in a way, that they do not limit themselves by sticking to close to research programs with a colonial heritage (Barry 2023). The collaboration of self-critical art education, the community and the researcher is an important part of this process. There lies an unseen source of knowledge in the everyday community meetings (Barry 2023). We want to take these forms of knowledge production into account in the research process as well as in processes of education. In addition to the review of the topics mentioned above, we are in the process of identifying alternatives besides the dominant forms of knowledge production and will consider reflections of these too.

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