Formed in January 2020, #Im4theArts is an artist-led movement for the rights of all workers in the South African arts sector with 18,000 Facebook and 800 formally registered members that are working for accountability and economic sustainability in the creative sector. The #Im4theArts Winter School was a response to members’ needs for capacity-building. As part of the Winer School, ARAC members Christian Nyampeta (Nyanza Working Group) and David Andrew (Johannesburg Working Group) participated in the first of three online Zoom sessions on the State of Arts Education in South Africa.
Speaking first, David Andrew offered an account of the process that resulted in the
UNESCO Road Map for Arts Education
. He did this with reference to the aims of the document presented at the World Conference on Arts Education in Lisbon, 2006, and the subsequent world conference whose findings are recorded in ‘The Seoul Agenda:
Goals for the Development of Arts Education
’ (2010). David ended his presentation with a discussion of Michael Wimmer’s
blog piece
titled From “The Seoul-Agenda” to “Another Road-Map for Arts Education” (March 2018) in which he acknowledges the deep-set problematics of the UNESCO processes and identifies the work of ARAC as constructively addressing these concerns.
Christian Nyampeta then went on to sketch the history and genesis of the history of the Another Roadmap School and the Africa Cluster in particular, spotlighting our efforts to supplement and critique the UNESCO processes, emphasising our focus on the histories of art/s education and our commitment to producing and sharing knowledge in forms that can be used meaningfully in African teaching and learning environments.