Session Information
MC SES 10, Research on Arts Education: Discomforts and Urgencies
Council Invited Session
Contribution
Although Arts Education has already obtained some consistency and a good degree of visibility in research and is, at a discursive level, assumed to be a recognized area by different European organizations such as the European Commission and Unesco, it still is an area that needs to be further developed and enhanced. This is directly related to the difficulty that the study of the Arts in Education encounters in its effort to become an autonomous field that lays claim to its own specificities. Furthermore, as a discrete field of study, the Arts in Education also represent the claim that the Science of Education and the practices that constitute the Creative Arts must remain distinct, albeit related. This claim reinforces the argument that the case for Arts Education as a discipline is singular by dint of its specificity, but also holds a breadth of interests and objectives by force of the plural nature of its practice-based nature. Trying to change the perceived ‘weaknesses’ of art education into a ‘legitimate’ form of scientific research urges us to re-think the very notion of research and the grammars that compose what is called knowledge. Via the diverse practices and forms of understanding that emerge from the arts, we would like to assert the arts’ presence within the research community by reclaiming the arts’ diverse ways of doing and seeing the world, not necessarily answering the questions put by other scientific fields. The times are not easy. We are surrounded by an increasing control and regulation and governed by grammars of values imposed as truths in research. What kind of questions are we asking and how much we know about what we ask? How are we prepared to fight through research against the naturalizations and common senses that still shape the place of the arts in education? This symposium emerges from the recent creation of the network on Research on Arts Education and all the participants argue for a dialectical relation between theory and practice from a variety of perspectives, engaging in intensive discussions that draw on a wide range of experiences focused on research on arts education, its methodologies and epistemological architectures. Not all the participants think in the same way about what arts education research is or should be. They come from different artistic backgrounds and their focuses are diverse but all of them are aware of the dangers and limitations that research on arts education, taken as a natural, represent for an art education yet to come.
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