The Learning Units each present arts education histories with a different geographical and historical focus. They invite to engage with histories, to reflect on one’s own previously acquired knowledge and to re-activate historical experiences in current art and education practice. Seven topics provide orientation in the resources, allowing to follow a path connecting several learning units.
The methods proposed range from individual exercises to concepts for learning processes in groups over a whole semester. As the resources have been conceived for a wide range of different learning contexts internationally each learning unit contains guidance as to who are the specific addressees and the proposed context of use – appropriations and adaptions for other contexts are welcome!
PATHS
Path: Critical Pedagogy and its critiques
The learning units, beyond introducing historical and contemporary concepts, aim to discuss the tensions and contradictions that become visible in critical pedagogy from different geopolitical perspectives.
Path: Working with images
The learning units that take on this mode of apprehending the world plead for a deeper investment in exploring context—our ways of seeing, personal and social histories, intersections as well as distantiations that impinge on our capacity to see beyond what is evident and how we’ve been taught to read and make sense.
Path: Letterwriting
How do we conceive of ‘the letter’ as both a personal and a public, collective thing?
Path: Reflexive Pedagogies/Critical Literacies
The Learning Units designed by the Kampala, Zurich and Maseru working groups emanate from different working contexts though they are related as kin in that each of them deploys exercises to encourage participants to understand that the texts and media we confront in our lives are never neutral, rather they are imbued with particular positionalities, politics and histories.
Path: Missionary dimensions in Arts Education
Through the research carried out by these working groups, we learn that missionary intervention was harmful in the way that it infantilised the people who were the targets of civilisation and emancipation, while undermining and devaluing pre-existing local symbolic creative works.