The European research project Exploring and Educating Cultural Literacy through Art (EXPECT_Art) aims to identify current barriers and potentials for promoting critical cultural literacy in arts education, education through arts and uses of art in education in schools located in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Spain. 

To this end, the EXPECT_Art project draws on a decolonial perspective on critical cultural literacy as a process of engaging with distinct conceptions, canons of knowledge (Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021) and ways of sensing from historically marginalized collectives (Spivak, 1998; Vergès, 2019). In so doing, it also considers curricula as “one of the great apparatuses designed to produce and reproduce a hegemonic modern(ity) way of existing and thinking” (Paraskeva & Steinberg, 2016, p. 3), thereby seeking to re-read and disrupt hierarchical power structures of classroom rules (Fassett & Warren, 2007) and fostering holistic, inclusive ways of learning to see the world (Leddy & O'neill, 2022).

However, good intentions alone are often insufficient to develop a truly decolonized school curriculum. Several decolonial scholars (e.g. Gorski, 2008; Dutta, 2020; Shahjahan et al., 2022) have emphasized the need to interrogate the colonial underpinnings of curricula precisely by encouraging researchers to critically reflect on their intentions when proposing initiatives rooted in a decolonial approach to cultural literacy. Importantly, this reflection must also include discourses on art and arts education by critically examining how its practices, methods, and underlying assumptions may perpetuate colonial frameworks even as they aim to challenge them.

This panel will present the initial steps of the EXPECT_Art project, following its fieldwork implementation in 12 schools and local communities across six European countries. Our focus is on examining how its decolonial approach is being realized and influencing the collaborating institutions within each national context (Dei, 2016), while also exploring how these institutions, through their requirements and perspectives, are shaping the project in return.

The EXPECT_Art consortium brings together teams of research institutions and artistic partners in each country to collaborate on defining interventions that connect schools with local communities in the effort to decolonize curricula. In this context, the arts are recognized as crucial for introducing critical cultural perspectives within schools and fostering participatory processes both with and within local communities (Helguera, 2011). Consequently, arts education goes beyond merely constructing, representing or studying marginalized cultures. Instead, it positions the arts as tools for promoting social interaction and fostering critical thinking through creativity, sensoriality, affectivity, embodiment and imagination (Addison et al., 2010; Bigé, 2019; Shusterman, 2014). Recognizing this, the panel firstly addresses the need to critically interrogate the assumptions and traditions of arts education itself, asking how it can better align itself with a decolonial agenda while fostering critical cultural literacy. Secondly, the role of arts education, education through the arts and the use of the arts in education in the early stages of the project is also discussed in the panel, which includes one researcher from each national team. 

In summary, each panel participant will address following key questions: a) how the decolonial approach of the project is applied, presented and how it informs specific practices in each local context; b) how external and internal institutions are changing our perspectives;the responses and challenges research teams are encountering  c) which artistic practices are shaping the process of affecting and being affected by schools and local communities; and d) how arts education, education through the arts and the uses of arts in education can promote critical cultural literacy in diverse contexts and contribute to the goal of decolonizing curricula.

Addison, N., Burgess, L. Steers, J., & Trowell, J. (2010). Understanding Art Education Engaging Reflexively with Practice. Routledge. Bigé, R. (2019). How Do I Know When I Am Dancing?. In D. Shottenkirk, M. Curado & S. Gouveia. (Eds.), Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics (pp. 319–332). Routledge. Dei, G. (2016). Decolonizing the university: The challenges and possibilities of inclusive education. Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 11(1), 23-23. Dutta, M. (2020) Whiteness, internationalization, and erasure: decolonizing futures from the Global South. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17(2), 228–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1770825 Fassett, D.L., & Warren, J.T. (2007). Critical communication pedagogy. Sage Publications. Gorski, P.C. (2008). Good intentions are not enough: A decolonizing intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19(6), 515–525. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675980802568319 Helguera, P. (2011). Education for socially engaged art: A materials and techniques handbook. Jorge Pinto Books. Leddy, S., & O’Neil, S. (2022). Learning to see: Generating decolonial literacy through contemporary identity-based Indigenous art. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 23(9). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea23n9 Paraskeva, J., & Steinberg, S. (2016). Curriculum: Decanonizing the field. Peter Lang. Shahjahan, R. A., Estera, A. L., &. Surla, K. (2022). ‘Decolonizing’ curriculum and `pedagogy: A Comparative review across disciplines and global higher education contexts. Review of Educational Research, 92(1), 73-113. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211042423 Shusterman, R. (2012). Muscle memory and the somaesthetic pathologies of everyday life. In D.S.T. Chen & L.A. Simon (Eds.), Thinking Through the Body. Essays in Somaesthetics (pp. 91–111) Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139094030.007 Spivak, G. (1998). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson y L. Grossber (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271-313). University of Illinois Press. Thambinathan, V., & Kinsella, E. A. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies in qualitative research: Creating spaces for transformative praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069211014766 Vergès, F. (2019) Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender. e-flux, 100, May 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/100/269165/capitalocene-waste-race-andgender/