Arts at the Center

Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein

Michigan State University, USA
rootbern@msu.edu, rootber3@msu.edu

st
Let us begin with the proposition that the 21 century demands renewed attention to creative imagination. As

Mitchel Resnick, of MITs Media Lab, writes: In todays rapidly changing world, people must continually come up
with creative solutions to unexpected problems. Success is based not only on what you know or how much you
know, but on your ability to think and act creatively (1). Solutions to complex and intractable problems such as
global warming, hunger, poverty, systemic injustice and eradicable disease will require thinkers and doers who
can bring to bear new combinations of knowledge and know-how in economic, political and cultural arenas.
Traditional expertise, traditional training will not be enough. It follows, then, that we must school our problemsolvers in new ways. We must prepare our young to envision as-yet-unheard-of possibilities that vastly improve
the lives of more people and simultaneously reaffirm authentic living. In short, we must educate for imagination
and creativity. To this educational enterprise, the arts provide the key.

To make the case we focus on the role of arts in the high-level pursuit of science, invention and business. While
many of our examples come from the European-American tradition, the patterns we describe apply worldwide.
The arts have always been and will always be at the center of creative practice in every discipline in every culture.
We support this argument by demonstrating four theses that have formed the backbone of much of our research:
1) arts and crafts underpin innovation in science and technology; 2) scientists can invent new arts and artists can
discover new sciences; 3) arts and crafts correlate with creativity in all disciplines, from literature to business; and
4) they do so because they involve mastery of creative process and its tools for thinking.

Thesis 1: Arts and Crafts Foster Scientific Creativity

Thesis 1, that the arts and crafts foster scientific creativity, was first proposed by J. H. vant Hoff, first Nobel Prize
winner in Chemistry. Imagination plays a role both in the ability to do scientific research as well as in the urge to
exploit this capability he observed. I have been prompted to investigate whether or not this [imaginative]
ability also manifests itself in famous scientists in ways other than their researches. A study of more than two
hundred biographies showed that this was indeed the case, and in large measure (2). Van Hoff found that
Galileo was an artist and a craftsman; Kepler a musician and composer; Sir Humphrey Davy an excellent poet;
and so on.

As our own research indicates, artistic or craft talent turns out to be typical of Nobel Prize winners and other
eminent scientists. Vant Hoff, himself, had artistic hobbies. He played the flute well, wrote poetry in four
languages, made models of many kinds and enjoyed sending out hand-made New Years cards. The French
Nobel laureate Alexis Carrell put the lace-making he learned as a child from his mother to good use when he
invented the stitching techniques that have made open heart surgery and transplants possible. Dorothy Hodgkin,
British Nobel laureate, learned from drawing how to think in three dimensions as a crystallographer. She
illustrated her parents archeological finds as a teen, and later her own crystallographic discoveries as well.

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Scientific vocation accompanied by artistic avocation can be found worldwide. Hideki Yukawa, Japanese Nobel
Prize winner in Physics, displayed a wide range of talents that include performing traditional Japanese songs and
practicing traditional calligraphy. His fellow physicist and Nobel laureate, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, was a painter and
photographer. Physicist Homi Bhabha, architect of Indias scientific programming in the 1950s, balanced his own
scientific research with painting, musical composition and playwrighting.

In many cases, these science vocations and artistic avocations intertwine. American physicist Robert R. Wilson,
who had a second career as a professional sculptor, is best known for designing both the supercollider at
FermiLab and also its architecture. He wrote at length about how the creative process of designing a
supercollider is the same as that of designing a sculpture. Indeed, FermiLab looks like a modern cathedral
because he believed that the best science is as beautiful and awe-inspiring as the best art. Similarly, Harvard
physicist and chemist Eric Heller models complex physicochemical processes with equations and then turns
these equations into images using computer graphics. He makes the most breathtaking of these graphics into
pieces of art. And sometimes that art reveals characteristics of his mathematical models not apparent from the
equations alone, thereby yielding new scientific insight.

Scientists have also relied on crafts for imaginative as well as experimental skill. Sir Lawrence Bragg, the
youngest Nobel laureate ever, learned from his artist mother to draw and paint, and his physicist father to work
with wood, metals, and other materials. The working scientist has need of hand knowledge, he wrote, for theory
is nothing if it cannot be reduced to novel experiment or a new piece of apparatus. Certainly this kind of
craftsmanship amply repaid Luis Alvarez, who owed a great deal of his inventive genius in modern physics to
visual and mechanical skills developed in technical high school. Likewise physician Virginia Apgar, known for
recognizing and combining the ten physiological functions that ascertain an infants health at birth, learned her
extraordinary observational skills as a trained musician and as a craftsman who made her own musical
instruments.

Statistical studies back up these examples and confirm that arts and crafts foster scientific ability. In our largest
and most recent study (3), we examined the biographies and autobiographies of all 510 Nobel Prize winners in
science (to 2005) and compared them with the biographies of 1634 United Kingdom Royal Society members,
1266 members of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, and 4406 members of a non-elite scientific
organization, Sigma Xi, which is open to membership by any practicing scientist. Compared with these typical
scientists, Nobel laureates are at least 2 times more likely to be photographers; 4 times more likely to be
musicians; 17 times more likely to be artists; 15 times more likely to be craftsmen; 25 times more likely to be
writers of non-professional writing, such as poetry or fiction; and 22 times more likely to be performers, such as
actors, dancers or magicians. An ongoing study of engineers appears to be yielding similar differences between
the average and the most successful engineers, with arts, writing, and crafts avocations being the best predictors
of professional success.

Thesis 2: Scientists Invent Art; Artists Invent Science

If arts and crafts foster better scientific and engineering ability, the equation also works in reverse as thesis 2:
Scientists invent new arts and artists invent new sciences and technologies. Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin,
discoverer of the first peptide hormones, certainly added a new dimension to the visual arts. When modeling
molecules with the first computer aided design programs, he quickly realized and exploited their aesthetic

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potential. He is now widely recognized as one of the founders of electronic art. In similar fashion the chemist
Lejaren Hiller transformed music. He, too, obtained access to one of the first computers for his chemical research
and quickly turned to programming the first computer-generated compositions, including his famous ILIAC Suite.
Hiller left chemistry in mid-career to compose full time.
th
Conversely, early 20 century American painter Abbott Thayer invented a new science. He mixed his art vocation

with his avocation, which was natural history, and in the process discovered that animals adapt to their
environments through camouflage. Both the modern science and the technology of camouflage owe their
existence to his application of a trained artistic eye to scientific questions. About the same time, American dancer
Loie Fuller pioneered a new kind of dance in the music halls of Paris, and did so with a series of patented
inventions that helped usher in the modern era of fluorescent costume and special stage lighting effects. More
recently, sculptor Wallace Walker has contributed an entirely new form of geometry with his paper sculpture
IsoAxis , developed at some length with geometer Doris Schattschneider (4).

The impact that such science-art interactions may have on society are often overlooked, witness the all-butforgotten example of actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil, who together invented a way to encode
electronic information called frequency hopping. First applied to weaponry in World War II, frequency hopping
now permits cell phones to send messages in encrypted forms that are largely safe from interference. Who would
guess that arts training lies behind such a revolutionary invention?! Yet we must consider, as MIT-trained
engineer, composer and artist Robert Mueller wrote in his book, The Science of Art (1967), that Art may be a
necessary condition for constructing the new consciousness from which future science gets its structural realities
to match nature, in which case it is more important than we generally admit.

Thesis 3: Arts and Crafts Correlate with Creativity in All Disciplines

Since the 1920s, studies have shown that most people who achieve eminence in one field display more than
average ability in one or more other fields as well. These are our Renaissance men and women. Yet the same
kind of breadth breeds success for other people, too. As one Israeli study concluded, the only reliable predictor of
professional achievement, no matter the field, is the individuals pursuit of an intellectually demanding avocation
over a long period of time (5). Polymathy developed skill in more than one discipline or field of interest is
highly correlated with vocational success.

As a means of investigating our third thesis that arts and crafts correlate with creativity in disciplines from
literature to business, we have been tracking polymathy in a number of ways. Recently, we amassed information
on the avocational interests of Nobel Prize winners in Economics, Peace and Literature and collated it with our
data on Nobel scientists (6). Overall, Nobel laureates have about three times more adult avocations than the
general U.S. public. As you might expect, each Nobel group has a distinct and different pattern of avocational
distribution. Here we make two simple observations: 1) there are very nearly the same proportions of Nobel
scientists with writing pursuits as Nobel writers with science pursuits and 2) the percentage of science laureates
with avocations in the arts is very nearly identical to the percentage of literature laureates with arts avocations.

Literature laureates with strong avocational interests in the visual arts, music, dance and drama include
Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, short-story writer, novelist, dramatist and educator who won the Nobel
Prize in 1913. He was also a composer, setting many hundreds of his poems to music; late in life, he took up

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painting. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean writer from St. Lucia who won the Nobel in 1992, has devoted much of his
life to painting as well as writing. And Gao Xingjian, the Chinese novelist, short story writer, and dramatist who
won the Nobel Prize in 2000, pursues a second career in painting -- indeed before winning the Nobel, he made
his living from his work as an artist.

Nobel Prize winners in other categories have also pursued one or other of the arts. Dag Hammarskjold,
posthumously awarded the Peace Prize in 1961, was not only a statesman, but a philosopher-writer and amateur
photographer. Albert Schweitzer, who won the Peace Prize in 1952 for his work as a medical missionary and
theologian, was well-known as a concert organist.

Beyond Nobel circles the arts continue to play strong avocational roles. As the two books, The Writers Brush
(2007) and Doubly Gifted (1986), make clear, the writer-artist combination is particularly common (7). Similarly,
individuals at work in business also place arts at the center of their interests. John D. Rockefeller IV founded the
Business Committee for the Arts after observing that companies fostering arts among employees and
communities were much more profitable than those that did not. Yet another book, The Art of Leadership (1998)
explores how arts stimulate creativity and profitability in several dozen companies around the world (8). Suk-Jean
Kang, former CEO of General Electric Korea and now CEO of LG Electronics provides a case in point. As CEO of
GE Korea, he arranged to take one full month off each year to paint. Not only did this time away from work
stimulate new ideas for Suk-Jean Kang, but it also permitted his coworkers to implement their skills and
strategies in his absence, building leadership.

Polymathic individuals often remark on the fit between vocation and avocation. American Charles Ives, at work in
the insurance industry even as he composed his iconoclastic music, made the two pursuits from the same cloth:
You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance, he is reported to have
said. The fabric weaves itself whole. My work in music helped my business and my work in business helped my
music (9). In this understanding Ives, like many other polymaths, linked his interests into an integrated network
of enterprise, correlative talents and creative habits (10). Whenever and wherever people meld the multiple
hats they wear, the same tendency to synthesize vocation and avocation is at work.

Thesis 4: Arts and Crafts Exercise Creative Imagination

Arts and crafts play a central role in these networks of enterprise because they readily exercise cognitive skills
necessary to imagination and to creativity. We base this fourth thesis on our work in Sparks of Genius, The 13
Thinking Tools of the Worlds Most Creative People (1999). Researching what hundreds of successful people in a
wide range of professions have had to say about their imaginative and creative abilities, we found a common set
of skills: observing, imaging, abstracting, pattern recognizing, pattern forming, analogizing, empathizing, body
thinking, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming and synthesizing. These are not esoteric skills,
available only to the highly talented or trained, however. These are skills available to everyone; they can be
exercised and honed. And because they are common to all problem-solving endeavors across the arts and
sciences, the humanities and technologies, they articulate the connections between disciplines that foster the
synergies of innovation.

In Sparks of Genius and elsewhere we draw out the profound role that each thinking tool plays in the arts, in the
sciences and in the bridging of the two (11). Consider here how the ancient art of origami, or paper folding, has

20

explored the possibilities of dimensional thinking for many centuries, providing artists and laymen alike with the
experience of transforming between flat planes of paper and the spatial volumes of paper sculpture. Surprisingly,
the deep understanding of dimensionality embodied in origami has only recently been appreciated outside the
craft itself. There is now an entire field of origami engineering, one of whose outcomes has been the invention of
origami stents that can be inserted into blood vessels in their folded-up form, and then expanded to keep the
blood vessel open after they are placed. Mathematicians have also recently discovered that origami articulates
an entirely new form of geometry, with rules all of its own.

Such a confluence of art and science achieves a synthesis of subjective and objective understanding that may be
called synosia. Aesthetic feeling, craft and scientific knowing all come together in that explosion of likeness
between unlike things that Jacob Bronowski saw at the heart of creative imagination (12). The contexts and
purposes of origami art, medical stents and newly discovered geometries appear worlds apart, and yet they
share the same underlying cognitive tools and foundations. It is in the nature of disciplines to carve out
boundaries that inhibit the cross-fertilization of ideas, data and techniques. It is in the nature of imaginative
thinking to permeate these boundaries and to pull unlike elements into synthesis.

So we return to where we began. Imaginative tools for thinking -- readily learned in the arts, practically applied in
science, technology, business and other public professions -- make creative synthesis and invention possible. If
st
we are to educate for creativity, as the 21 century challenges us to do, we must educate for imagination and its

thinking tools as well. Sparks of Genius suggests eight strategies for achieving this goal; including these three: 1)
Teach tools for thinking, so that students learn to develop imaginative skills and original ideas. 2) Teach creative
process, so that students learn how ideas and things are imagined and made. 3) Place arts on an equal footing
with sciences and other core subjects, so that students learn the imaginative thinking and expression that leads
to discovery and invention. The practice of arts and the development of correlative talents should be required
for all students from kindergarten through college.

Let us end with three take-home messages. First, arts and crafts develop skills, tools, concepts, structures, and
knowledge that are useful to many other disciplines; indeed, their practice correlates with professional creativity
in the sciences and technologies, in literature and business. Second, the arts particularly exercise the creative
imagination and its thinking tools and develop mastery of creative process. Third, any effort to educate for
creativity must therefore include arts at the center. This role for the arts supposes a utilitarian value and purpose,
but so it is for all disciplines at the hub of education. Just as we do not teach mathematics solely or mainly to train
new mathematicians, nor teach languages solely or mainly to produce poets and novelists, we cannot teach the
arts and crafts simply to educate more artists and craftspeople. Arts and crafts look out upon a much larger
horizon. Arts and craftsand the thinking tools they exercisebelong at the center of education because they
can and will ignite the creative imagination vital to those innovations in science, politics, and culture that must
lead us into the future.

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References

(1) Resnick, M. (2007). Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society. Learning & Leading with Technology,
ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) (December/January 2007-08, pp. 18-22).
(2) Vant Hoff, J. H. (1967). Imagination in Science. (G.F. Springer, Trans.). Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and
Biophysics, I, pp. 1-18. Originally published 1878.
(3) Root-Bernstein, R., Allen, L., Beach, L., Bhadul, R., Fast, J., Hosey, C., Kremkow, B., Lapp, J., Lonc, K.,
Pawelec, K., Podufaly, A., Russ, C., Tennant, L., Vrtis, E., & Weinlander, S. (2008). Arts Foster Scientific Success:
Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi Members. Journal of Psychology of
Science and Technology, I (2), pp. 51-63.
(4) Schattschneider, D. & Walker, W. (1977). M.C. Escher Kaleidocycles. Corte Madera, California: Pomegranate
Artbooks, Inc.
(5) Milgram, R., Hong, E., Shavit, Y., & Peled, R. (1997). Out of school activities in gifted adolescents as a
predictor of vocational choice and work accomplishment in young adults. Journal of Secondary Gifted Education,
8, pp. 111-120. See also Milgram, R. & Hong, E. (1993). Creative Thinking and Creative Performance in
Adolescents as Predictors of Creative Attainments in Adults: A Follow-up Study after 18 Years. In R. Subotnik and
K. Arnold (Eds.). Beyond Terman: Longitudinal Studies in Contemporary Gifted Education. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex;
and Hong, E. Milgram, R., & Whiston, S. (1993). Leisure Activities in Adolescence as a Predictor of Occupational
Choice in Young Adults: A Longitudinal Study. Journal of Career Development, 19, pp. 221-29.
(6) For preliminary data on literature Nobels, see Root-Bernstein, R. & Root-Bernstein, M. Artistic Scientists and
Scientific Artists: The Link Between Polymathy and Creativity. In R. Sternberg, E. Grigorenko & J. Singer (Eds.),
Creativity From Potential to Realization (pp. 127-151). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
(7) Friedman, D. (2007). The Writers Brush, Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Writers. Minneapolis, MN:
Mid-List Press. Hjerter, K. (1986). Doubly Gifted, The Author as Visual Artist. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
(8) Finn, D. & Jedlicka, J. (1998). The Art of Leadership, Building Business-Arts Alliances. New York: Abbeville
Press.
(9) Ives quoted by Marianne Moore in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1963-1984. Series 2, p. 86.
(10) For networks of enterprise, see Gruber, H. (1984). Darwin on Man.: A Psychological Study of Scientific
nd

Creativity. 2

ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. For correlative talents, see Root-Bernstein, R. (1989).

Discovering, Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
(11) Due to space limitations, the illustrated discussion of a number of the thinking tools and their creative role in
art and science in our keynote address is not rendered here. Readers may refer to Root-Bernstein, R. & RootBernstein, M. (1999). Sparks of Genius. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin for tool descriptions and examples.
Additional material may be found in the source cited in footnote 6, above, and in Root-Bernstein, R. & RootBernstein, M. (2003). Intuitive Tools for Thinking, in L.Shavanina (Ed.), International Handbook of Innovation (pp.
37-387). New York: Erlbaum.
(12) Bronowski, J. (1965). Science and Human Values. New York: Harper & Row. Originally published 1956.

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UNESCO report of the survey results

on the implementation of the Road Map for Arts Education
UNESCO
artsedu@unesco.org

Executive Summary

The Road Map for Arts Education is a reference document that aims to explore the role of arts education in
meeting the need for creativity and cultural awareness in the 21

st

Century, while placing emphasis on the

strategies required to introduce or promote arts education in the learning environment. From this conceptual
framework, all UNESCO Member States interested in initiating or developing arts education practices can mould
their own national policy guidelines, adapted to their socio-cultural specificities. With the Road Map, UNESCO
advocates the essential role of arts education within societies, to create a common ground of understanding for
all stakeholders.

The development of the Road Map for Arts Education was a lengthy and comprehensive consultation process.
The document was first elaborated by a group of experts and UNESCO, then presented at the First World
Conference on Arts Education (Lisbon, 2006) and later revised and updated, following recommendations from
NGOs and Member States. The Road Map was finally distributed to the UNESCO Member States in November
2007 in English and French and then translated into Spanish and Russian following popular demand.

More than a year after this distribution, UNESCO launched a wide-ranging survey in order to assess the
implementation of the Road Map in its 193 Member States. Through its National Commissions, the Organization
relayed this document to Ministries of both Education and Culture. The aim of this exercise was threefold: to learn
whether the Road Map was being applied and to what extent it was influencing policy decisions at national level;
to act as a reminder of the importance of the UNESCO reference document and encourage its use; finally, to
assess the situation of arts education in the responding countries.

Thus, this survey not only acted as a catalyst

for the implementation of the Road Map, but provided precious knowledge on arts education around the world.
The Member States responses also contributed greatly to the Second World Conference, inspiring one of its
main themes and the topics for a number of workshops.

They also encouraged a more integral participation of

these States in the conference through preparatory consultations.

Over the last year, the number of responses to this mass inquiry has risen to reach an impressive 47 percent (93
responses).

This great yield highlights a number of issues key to the development of arts education: there is an

undeniable interest in arts education and its implementation, notably in developing countries, showing that this
field is not reserved to the elite few but on the contrary relevant to all; the Road Map has had its desired impact
on Member States, sensitising them to this innovative way of approaching education and society and helping
them to better integrate arts education in both formal and informal education.

Note: As with any survey, not all respondents provided answers to all questions. However, the number of empty
responses was rarely above 5 percent of total returned questionnaires, giving the survey full statistical value and
representation.

23

The Road Map for Arts Education has benefited from wide propagation and has been distributed in more
than two thirds of the responding countries.

It was mainly diffused to elected officials, less to higher

education or cultural institutions and sometimes directly to schools. Where the framework had not yet been
distributed at the time of the response, the questionnaire served as a reminder of the importance UNESCO
places on arts education. Projects have been elaborated or implemented with direct reference to the Road
Map in half of the respondents countries, two thirds of which are already in application.

Despite not having

direct reference to the UNESCO document, projects for arts education exist in most of the other countries.

Contributions were sent from all UNESCO regions: Africa (17), the Arab States (14), Asia and the Pacific
(17), Europe and North America (36), and Latin America and the Caribbean (9).

The variety of the

responses transcends regional barriers and shows not only the diversity but also the similarities of the
situation of and interest in arts education around the globe: an African country may share the same vision
on the role of arts education as a European one, while a Caribbean island can encounter the same
problems as a Pacific counterpart.

The survey uncovered a strong consensus from all respondents to broaden the Road Map to populations outside
of schools. Most suggest that the document should address most if not all of the population, young or old,
parent or craftsperson. Furthermore, one third of all answers stated that it would be useful to expand the Road
Map to specialised entities, such as cultural or educational institutions, NGOs and arts groups. Finally, a small
group proposed to provide a shorter version for use at a local level, to sensitise communities generally distant
from decision makers to the importance of arts education in their society.

The high number of responses provided a rich source of information regarding the situation of arts education
around the world. The development of individual capabilities, including cognitive and creative capacities was
identified as the main aim for arts education in half of the responses. While this field was rarely identified as a
means to promote the expression of cultural diversity, it was frequently viewed as being crucial in improving the
overall quality of education and key to upholding the human right to education and cultural participation.
However, there are several obstacles to reaching theses aims.
countries is lack of funding.

The main one in nearly half responding

Other obstacles that need to be overcome are, in order of frequency, the difficulty of

applying arts education to current education systems, lack of awareness from relevant actors and finally lack of
cooperation from stakeholders involved.
The main source of funding for arts education with very few exceptions is national government funding. This is
sometimes complemented by local government funding when the States power and resource distribution is more
regionally oriented, in federal states for example.

The responses highlight that even if public or private

foundations and individual donors provide some funding in the field of arts education in some countries, it is in no
way comparable to the scale of governmental funding.
On average, two ministries are in charge of arts education in each country, with up to four in a few cases. This
shows that this field is considered relevant by ministries of both education or higher education and culture. In
countries where more than one ministry is involved in arts education, the majority of cross-ministry collaborations
concern the co-elaboration of common programmes and, to a lesser extent, the joint development of laws or
policies. The responses highlight that the co-elaboration of a common budget for arts education between
ministries is carried out in only a minority of cases. Overall, these collaborations are encouraging for the future as

24

there needs to be strong inter-ministerial cooperation between education and culture officials if arts education is
to encompass a wide range of issues, from formal education to socio-cultural dimensions.
This trend is also reflected to some extent by the terminology used to indicate what UNESCO refers to as arts
education. There is a strong dominance of the term Arts Education in countries, but the expression Arts and
Cultural Education is also widely used, showing the understanding in certain Member States that this discipline
not only refers to the teaching of arts, but also a broader education of all cultural aspects of a society.
Regarding arts education actors themselves, they benefit from various forms of education to raise their
awareness and develop their knowledge and skills in most countries. Arts teachers receive such training the
most, in two thirds of countries, whereas teachers of general subjects and artists or cultural educators do so in
approximately half of the responding States.

This education consists nearly always of continuous training, such

as internships, seminars, workshops and the like. The dissemination of written resources, however important
and wide-spread, is not as common a practice, the more interactive training being favoured over a more
academic approach.
Arts education is not just limited to the formal education environment. As stated in a large majority of responses,
this field benefits out-of-school children and young people, as well as disabled people and adult vocational
trainees. Other groups include senior citizens and prisoners and to a lesser extent, indigenous peoples, sick
people or immigrant populations. These activities serve mainly as a form of social integration for these different
groups, as well as being complementary to school education or even leisure activities and recreation, depending
on the populations and the average leisure time available to them in their respective countries.
Research on arts education is undertaken on a regular basis in more than two-thirds of responding countries.
The primary subjects of this research are varied, with the more frequent areas of studies being the evaluation of
arts education related policies, and training for arts education practitioners, be they teachers, cultural
professionals, artists or others. The assessment of the impact of arts education is also a regular research
subject, however, there is further need for work to be done on the role played by arts education in socio-cultural
empowerment.

The strong interest and involvement of Member States in the Road Map and arts education in general reflected in
this survey is encouraging for the future of this field.

Aided by this conceptual framework, these countries have

or will be able to develop their own ways of initiating, promoting and expanding activities related to arts education,
inside and outside of schools.

However, the survey highlighted an area not sufficiently covered in the Road Map,

which is the socio-cultural dimension of arts education.

The responses emphasized the need to enlarge the

perspective of arts education and the Road Map to encompass this dimension. Indirectly inviting UNESCO to
approach this request through its Second World Conference, the Member States have shown that they support
the UNESCO Road Map for Arts Education as being a suitable guide for the current development of arts
education at national level.

They also believed that this Conference could be an ideal opportunity to go further,

in order to provide in addition to a long-term tool a set of objectives that would enable the sustainable integration
of arts education into every facet of society.

The

final

report

on

this

survey

will

be

available

on

the

UNESCO

Arts

Education

(www.unesco.org/culture/en/artseducation) after the Second World Conference on Arts Education.

25

website

26

Strengthening the socio-cultural dimensions of arts education

Jean-Pierre Daogo Guingan
University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
guingane@yahoo.fr

Education
All societies, regardless of their level of evolution, elaborate an educational system whose main objective is to
assure the social integration of its members. Through this integration, each individual is helped through
understanding, assimilation, the acquisition of experiences, knowledge, know-how and established rules to
guarantee themselves certain living conditions alongside their fellow humans that make it possible to be a
dynamic and productive actor in society.
Those whom this education will not have succeeded in touching, in forming, constitute a group of individuals
existing on the fringes of society. Proper education should be flexible in order to make room for the personality of
each individual to bloom and blossom. It must also be rigid in order to establish clear rules of the social game, in
which respect for others makes peaceful cohabitation possible.
Education makes it possible to draw a collective identity for a social group. This recognized and accepted identity
is what is handed down, from generation to generation, to all those called upon to join or who belong to the
particular community.

Arts education
Arts education, a component of general education, is of capital importance.

It contributes to developing an individuals:

Sensitivity

Emotion

Perception of the other

Ability to compare (which leads to the development of reason)

Vision of the world

It opens the distant immediate environment in a spirit of:

Pluralism:
The world belongs to all of the elements inhabiting it.

Diversity:
Each element constitutes an entity with its own particularities (size, colour, alive, dead, etc.).

It gives the individual ways of expressing the world and of expressing themselves on the world:

The Arts can be tools of expression :

Writing

Theatre

Music

27

Danse

Fine arts

Etc.

The Arts can be tools of exploration :

Of the individual (their interior)

Of the behaviour of the social being

Of the community

The Arts can be tools of contemplation of the surrounding world

As it is perceived, arts education forms subjective witnesses of the world who express themselves
according to :

Their own sensitivity

Their personal history

Their interpretation of the world

Globalisation and its challenges

Arts education, under the pressure of globalisation, may tend to :

Eliminate distinctive identities

Impose single ways of thinking, feeling and seeing

Standardizing human behaviour

Working against all forms of diversity

The objective of globalization seems to lead to one single kind of human being with the same tastes and
behaviours; in short it seems to lead to a kind of uniqueness that facilitates economic transactions.

And yet, as a critic justly writes, the mission of [arts education] cannot be to train individuals capable of
responding only to the expectations and demands of world economic and financial powers; but it must
prepare women and men who are themselves capable of creating the society in which they want to live
[] Arming ourselves with the conditions necessary to avoid going in this negative direction, means
putting all our efforts on the side of Man; it means preparing him to use the means that he has within
himself: creativity, a critical mind, intellectual independence, freedom in the sense of the complete use
of oneself (Pierre VAN CRAEYNEST Les pratiques artistiques de lenseignement gnral in Art en
germe p. 14)

We must avoid going in the negative direction that Pierre VAN CRAEYNEST speaks about and provide
an arts education capable of forming individuals who are world citizens by virtue of their universality but
who are also strongly rooted to their lands.

While it is true that in the search of particular identities we attain universality, it is also necessary in arts education
programmes to reinforce the socio-cultural dimensions so that while being universal, the artists of tomorrow and
their works also continue to be singular, and remain the products of identifiable cultures.

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Some avenues of reflection on reinforcing the socio-cultural dimension in Arts Education

The use of local languages

Languages are one of the most important elements in cultural diversity

Languages are an opening to the deep culture of people

The practice of languages enriches the personality of the learner

The use of local languages guarantees the destination of expressions towards a priority public, and their

being rooted in a culture shared both by the artist and by the public
Involvement of local traditional artists

Guarantees a good handing down of heritage to the new generations

Link between a new public and a traditional public

Shrinks the generational gap and strengthens social cohesion

Exposes traditionalists to new artistic forms and techniques

Protection and conservation of traditional tools and instruments (music, fine arts, dance costumes, etc.)

Broadening of the public

The use of local cultural heritage

Written literature

Oral literature (stories, legends, myths, etc)

Country sides (rivers, mountains, volcanoes, etc.)

Customs (costumes, traditions, folklore etc.)

History

The use of places dedicated to Arts Education

Places dedicated to arts education will be, as much as possible, chosen based on their social or cultural
significance.

The arts education programme should at least include visits to important sites of local culture (historical
palaces, museums, Religious sites, etc.)

Discovery of local artists

Support the learner in discovering and getting to know the works of local artists in their discipline who
are known and recognized for their quality, before they are put in contact with artists from other cultures.

Support the learner in becoming interested in the works of current problem or marginal artists. It is
often these artists who have the most impact on the learners imagination.

Encourage the decasting of arts education

There exist communities in which certain artistic practices are linked to particular casts. In such settings, arts
education only reaches a minority (the members of these communities). To the extent that Arts Education is good
for everyone, it would be desirable to find ways to involve the maximum number of people in such activities.

29

30

Responding to the challenges of arts education: Tensions between traditional and

contemporary practices and transcending geo-cultural differences?
Cultural Dialogue in Music: From the Personal to the Collaborative
Hi Kyung Kim
University of California, Santa Cruz, Korea/USA
hkim@ucsc.edu

It is a privilege and a pleasure to be speaking at the UNESCO 2

nd

World Conference on Arts Education here in

Seoul, Korea. I would like to begin by describing some key moments in my personal history that relate to our
topic in 1982 at the University of California, Berkeley, when I felt a sense of difference as a newly-arrived
Korean-American; in 1989 in Paris, when I found my cultural identity again called into question, and now 28 years
later, when I presented the fourth Pacific Rim Music Festival at the University of California, Santa Cruz just last
month.
I was born in Seoul and spent the first 25 years of my life here. I graduated from the College of Music at Seoul
National University with a BA degree in Music Composition in 1977. In 1980 my father, who was a Presbyterian
Minister, responding to a desire he had of helping Korean immigrants in the United States, moved our family to
California, where I have lived ever since. I went to the University of California, Berkeley for my graduate
education in 1982. I knew I was a new arrival, so when the shock of a different educational and musical culture
hit me at UC Berkeley I was somewhat prepared. I realized immediately during the first composition seminar with
the other graduate students that I had a different cultural background and different inspiration than they had. I
knew from that moment my own Korean tradition was deeply embedded in me. My first composition I wrote there
was based on the essence of the Korean folk song, A-Ri-Rang, a piece called A Ri written for voice and string
quartet.
In 1989 I had the opportunity to study for two years in Paris as part of a grant from UC Berkeley, and it was there
that I received quite an unexpected cultural shock. I was studying in the DEA (Diplme d'tudes Approfondies)
program at the IRCAM (Institut de Rechreche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) and cole Normale
Supriere, and in a seminar I played a recording of the premiere performance of the first movement of my
composition, Islands in the Bay, a Percussion Concerto. To my surprise, some of my classmates commented
that I was writing "American" Music. This came as a complete shock, and my own cultural identity suddenly
became mysterious to me. In America I had been considered a Korean composer, and now here in Paris I was
being called an American composer. I was confused and did not know how to proceed in my music with such a
comment. I was helped by the comments of two of my teachers at that time. I asked Jean-Baptiste Barrire, who
was the director of the Pedagogy department at IRCAM, about this comment. He advised me, Why be bothered
by others? Just be yourself and find your roots. Dont you have your own heritage to study? That was an
important comment for me--simple and direct. Around the same time, the late German-Korean composer, YUN
Isang told me that I should try to respond naturally to whatever I have in me. These words from my elders gave
me great guidance. Since that time I have known that I had those two cultures within me, and that I was a
KoreanAmerican composer.
I was confronted by the differences between musical traditions in 1985, when I returned to Korea to begin a
deeper study of Korean traditional music. I had training as a Western composer/musician since I was eight years

31

old. Moving to America had reawakened my desire to learn about my Korean culture, and I was naturally
attracted to Korean traditional music. I was able to go to Korea in the summer of 1985 to study Korean music in
all areas: history, theory, performance. Thats when I met my teacher, PARK, Eun-Ha, Senior performer in
Samulnori (folk percussion ensemble) at the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. Her teaching
was focused on the traditional method--the oral tradition, without music scores or recordings, and therefore we
needed to stay extremely focused in order to remember what she just played for us. I completed learning the
entire piece of Seol Jang Go that summer, and since then, I practiced it and taught it to students and a
colleague friend who became an ethnomusicologist in Korean Music, the late Marnie Dilling (Professor at the
University of California, San Diego). This music was internalized and remains in me until now, and so I was later
able to write a string quartet based on Seol Jang Go.
In 2001, I wrote a piece called, Rituel for Western ensemble and a Korean drummer/ dancer featuring my
teacher, PARK, Eun-Ha. The piece was dedicated to my two friends who died around that time, one of them was
Marnie Dilling. The important concept of this piece was to keep the Korean traditional music unchanged for Ms.
PARKs part and let the other instrumentalists improvise within that framework. It was particularly interesting to
see the dialogue between Korean performer PARK and the Western percussionist, William Winant, who was an
accomplished improvisor within the Western contemporary music tradition. With the success of this performance,
it was possible to create the next projects of Rituel II and III.
At around the same time (2001) I was invited to write a work for the Hun Qio [Bridge of Souls] Project: Premiere
Concert, Remembrance and Reconciliation, featuring Yo-Yo Ma and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota.
This project was meant to use music to heal the wounds of the Second World War in the Pacific arena.
Composers were chosen from China (Chen Yi), Japan (Michio Mamiya), Korea and the United States (Andrew
Imbrie) to represent the nations involved in that conflict. Since I was representing Korea I was asked by them to
use the Korean folk song, Arirang, for the theme of the entire piece. It was a project to find reconciliation and
th
peace through musiclooking back at the wounds of the mid- 20 century war era, and looking forward to a

future with a positive view toward working and living together in harmony. Music and the Arts can heal and
overcome wounds and boundaries.
The above projects reflected my personal growth and my attempts to forge an artistic voice out of the
combination of cultures that came from my personal experience. In the projects I want to describe next, I
attempted to create this synthesis on a larger scale, with more musicians from both cultures and with the idea of
creating an educational environment for students as well as for mature artists to exchange their traditions of
music and aesthetics. The fusion of cultures can be simple and superficial, but I wanted to provide a context by
which my students could go more deeply into a culture foreign to them and try to create musical works of depth
and expressiveness.
Festival for Gayageum and Western Instruments (2006-07)
The gayageum is one of Koreas oldest musical instruments. It has a technique unique to the instrument, and
produces music that is unlike any other in the world, consisting of subtle pitch bending and inflection that is not
possible on any other instrument.
I teach musical composition at UC Santa Cruz, and in 2006 I had the idea to try to engage my students in a
project of writing new compositions that combine this elegant and ancient instrument with Western instruments.

32

The first problem was that they knew nothing about this instrument or about traditional Korean music in general.
While I was able to offer a seminar on Korean music, I also wanted to give my students in-depth and hands on
experience with this instrument. I organized workshops at UC Santa Cruz taught by one of Koreas best
gayageum performers and teachers, KWAK Eun-Ah (professor at Ewha Womans University). I was able to find
funding from the University of California, Santa Cruz to bring KWAK from Korea to Santa Cruz for an extended
period. Graduate students, undergraduates and faculty members participated in her workshops in order to learn
about this ancient instrument and were then invited to write new works for any combination of gayageum and
western instruments. Also participating were graduate students from UC Berkeley and UC Davis. There is a
modern version of the gayageum that has more strings, and is able to provide a complete chromatic scale that is
characteristic of Western music. Many composers have written for this instrument before, and it carries much the
same role in the ensemble as a harp would, for example. I wanted to use the same technique and language of
traditional Korean music, so for this project we only used the original instrument with 12-strings in order to
understand and carry the beauty of the traditional musical language. KWAK Eun-Ah presented 25 hours of
workshops on gayageum, bringing with her enough instruments so that each student would have a chance to
play on the instrument. Ultimately, 17 composers, including faculty and graduate students from UC Santa Cruz,
Berkeley, Davis, and two Korean composers wrote new compositions using gayageum in combinations with other
instruments.
In 2007, the Festival for Gayageum and Western Instruments was presented in Northern California and in Seoul,
Korea. Ten concerts and one seminar were presented. This was the first attempt by an institution outside Korea
to learn a Korean instrument and create contemporary pieces for it in solo or ensemble forms along with western
instruments. The project was greeted enthusiastically on both sides of the Pacific.
This was a pilot project toward the development of new cultural forms, and it was more successful than we could
have dreamed. It has not stopped since then. The participating performers and composers of this project
continue to create new works and extend their instrumentation, and concerts have been presented in Japan,
Korea and in the US annually in 2008, 2009 and 2010.
Cultural Synthesis Project at the Pacific Rim Music Festival (2009-10)
As a result of the success of this project, we decided to expand upon it and include more traditional Korean
instruments in a new project that we called the "Cultural Synthesis" project. This project was inspired in part by a
unique group of traditional musicians from Seoul, the Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea (CMEK, YI Jiyoung,
director). Their ability and dedication proved a key factor in the success of this project. They represent a new,
younger generation of traditional Korean musicians. While they have all achieved mastery of their traditional
Korean music, they have also been trained in Western music as well. They all read music, for example, and are
familiar with Western music theory. Several of them have written dissertations in which they have tried to
communicate their traditional music through new notated forms, in a scholarly way. In this sense they represent a
break from the older traditional musicians who studied strictly in the old oral tradition. More than anything else,
their dual training, with one foot in the traditional music world and one foot in the contemporary musical world
made this project possible. They are dedicated not just to preserving their traditional music, but also embrace the
creation of new genres in their music.
Four members of CMEK came to UC Santa Cruz for five weeks in January and February 2009 to give intensive
workshops for 75 hours: three hours a day, five days a week. Four instruments were the main focus of the

33

workshopsgayageum (12 string-zither), haegeum (2 string-fiddle), daegeum (bamboo flute), and ajaeng
(bowed zither).

Structured around the academic requirements of a college course, the workshops required a

dedication and time commitment that far exceeded the typical course requirement. Both students and faculty
participated in the workshops. The presence of such gifted musicians helped inspire all of them to this greater
commitment.
Daegeum virtuoso and CMEK member KIM Jeong-Seung stated about this workshop experience that "Through
participation in the Workshops at UC Santa Cruz, I was very proud as a Korean Traditional Musician and saw lots
of possibilities for new development of Korean traditional music. I really looked forward to the next step of the
collaborative project, which was the performance at the Pacific Rim Music Festival 2010."
After the workshops, twenty-five composers (twelve faculty and thirteen graduate students) from UC Santa Cruz,
Berkeley, Davis, San Diego, Columbia University and Brandeis University as well as from the Korean National
University of the Arts diligently worked on their new compositions for the instrumentation of Korean instruments
with Western instruments. We decided to focus on the Western ensemble of the String Quartet, and invited the
Del Sol Quartet from San Francisco, and the Lydian Quartet from Boston to participate in this project. We also
invited the New York New Music Ensemble, one of New York City's finest contemporary music ensembles, and
the Santa Cruz Chamber players to participate, augmenting the string quartets with wind, keyboard and
percussion instruments. Over the course of the next year composers submitted sketches of their work - in partial
or more complete forms - to the performers for feedback and criticism, and changes and improvements were
made to the compositions as a result of this feedback.
The Internet and email proved an invaluable aid in this process, and helped to overcome the geographical
distances involved. A composer in Santa Cruz could email a sketch to performers in Seoul or in Boston, and
receive comments and suggestions back within a few days. In some cases the performer could even email an
mp3 file of the composers score in performance, so the composer could hear the music and revise the work
accordingly. This proved of great value to composers who, even after the workshops on the traditional
instruments, were still relative novices in these new techniques. This collaboration created very close
communication with the composers and performers (both Korean and Western).
About this process, Laurie San-Martin, composer/ professor at the University of California, Davis where she codirects the Empyrean Ensemble of Contemporary Music writes: Writing for gayageum and string quartet was one
of the most rewarding projects I have undertaken as a composer. The Pacific Rim Music Festival is run with
ambition, vision and extreme diligence. The choice of musicians and composers has also been thoughtfully
selected. I found the entire experience to be professional, rewarding, and inspirational. I feel that I wrote a very
strong piece partly because of all the preparation and help that the Pacific Rim Music Festival provided including
master classes with the Korean instrumentalists, literature pamphlets and CD recordings of the instruments.
Professor San-Martin continues: The gayageum performer, Ji-young YI gave a very detailed master class at UC
Santa Cruz that was many hours long and covered the techniques and nuances of writing for the instrument.
While writing the piece over the next few months, I was able to send excerpts to Ji-young who would then send
back an mp3 of how my excerpt would sound. This is very rare---for a musician to learn the music so far in
advance and then record it and send back over email. Ji-young's efforts demonstrated to me how dedicated she
was to giving first-rate performances and how she took the project very seriously. This is one of the most
conscientious responses I have seen from a busy and professional musician. The Lydian String Quartet members

34

were also very responsive and helpful giving feedback about my writing and parts well in advance of the concert.
This use of old and new technologies seemed to work well in the way that it was structured. That is, students first
met the traditional musicians face to face in the workshops. Beginners that they were, the western students were
learning the instruments with hands-on experience the way they would have a hundred years ago. They then
communicated with the musicians using the most modern technologies, email, internet, mp3 and computer
generated scores, to go deeply into the particular areas of the instrument that most interested them and that they
were embodying in their musical compositions. The impersonality of the new technology was overcome by the
initial, face-to-face meetings in the workshops. Participants met on a human level, new friendships and working
relationships were initiated, and then technology helped to continue and develop them.
The entire creative process of learning the instruments/traditions, creating new compositions and getting
feedback from the performers, took us about two years. The results of this effort were extremely rewarding! They
were finally showcased by premiere performances at the Pacific Rim Music Festival.
I founded and have been Artistic Director of the Pacific Rim Music Festival at the University of California since
1996. The fourth presentation of the Pacific Rim Music Festival at Santa Cruz and at Brandeis University in April
2010 was the perfect opportunity to present the results of this Cultural Synthesis project. A series of concerts
called the Premiere Concerts presented twenty-five world premiere performances of new music written for
combinations of Western instruments and the traditional players of CMEK. Three programs were presented.
Twenty-five composerstwelve distinguished faculty composers and thirteen graduate student composers
representing five generations and from ten different nationalities participated. Thirty-two top caliber performers -Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea (ten members), the Del Sol String Quartet from San Francisco, Lydian
String Quartet from Boston, Santa Cruz Chamber Ensemble from Santa Cruz, and the New York New Music
Ensemble performed. Five musicologists participated in seminars and colloquia presented at UC Santa Cruz. A
total of sixty-two artists participated.
Judith Eissenberg of the Lydian String Quartet commented after the performances that
The experience of working on the newly composed pieces was truly memorable. It was interesting to hear how
each composer dealt with the problem of writing for musicians of such different traditions. We have composers
to thank for being the fearless mediators, imagining new languages, finding common ground, and valuing our
differences. The act of creation is such a powerful unifying force; we all felt that as we worked together. It is a
lesson for the world, and artists can help light the path.
The audience reaction was strongly felt. Both in Santa Cruz and at Brandeis, students, faculty, community
members, composers, performers - all were drawn in to the gorgeous soundscapes and stunning musical ideas.
Haegeum virtuoso, CHUNG Soo-Neon, professor at Korean National University of the Arts stated that A New
st
Sound Era for the 21 Century opened through the Pacific Rim Music Festival: I am certain that a new musical

genre for Korean Traditional Instruments, as well as a curtain rising on a new stage for Western Music were
enabled through this Premiere Concert project.
The achievement of this project could not have occurred without significant financial support. We received
support from and are grateful to the University of California, the Korea Foundation, and to numerous individual
donors who made this project possible.
A comment by Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz, David Evan Jones: "I was impressed with the standing

35

traditional ensembles supported by the Korean government and cultural institutions. I believe that this effort to
preserve tradition frees the contemporary imagination: if you know your cultural foundations are safe you are free
to experiment!"
This project tried to represent the positive side of this process of moving from the personal to the collaborative.
Most of us deal with the issues of cultural identity on our own, on a personal basis, with whatever resources we
may be able to gather on our own. Moving this project to an institutional level enabled us to challenge these
problems together, and to provide support to each other as we struggled with them. I hope it gave the individuals
involved another level of resource by which they could deal with these issues, but it could not have been
achieved without significant support from those educational and government resources.
The renewed interest in traditional music of all the world cultures has been an encouraging development of the
last few decades. The personal experiences and projects I have described have all been directly influenced by
the search for tradition in modern life. The Cultural Synthesis project shows how traditional and modern music
can be combined within an educational structure at a school. There are also other implications that this topic
raises.
Within the field of music, there are several conflicting opinions expressed as to just how traditional music should
be treated and preserved. At the Festival, one of the topics discussed was Pansori. Pansori is a beloved vocal
form among the Korean people. A single singer, accompanied by a single drummer, presents a dramatic narrative
story that is sung and spoken over several hours, in a uniquely Korean vocal style. It has been recognized as an
important vocal form by being named a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The question arose, how should this traditional form be treated in the 21st century? I can illustrate using three
differing treatments of the form.
1) At one of the colloquia, the musicologist John Robison presented a paper on the use of Pansori in the work of
the contemporary Korean composer LEE Chan-Hae. LEE Chan-Hae has said, I think Pansori is like a monodrama, opera. It is the sound of the common people. I wanted to make it like an opera, and wanted to perform it
with Western ensemble, so it could be appreciated by a global audience. We can share this Pansori with many
people in the world, and not just have it regarded as an ethnic music
She has been trying to compose the five Pansori pieces using different Western Ensembles, with the
accompaniment in a modern contemporary musical language. The Pansori singing melody is the same as the
original form, but the role of the Drum (Buk) accompaniment is replaced by an ensemble accompaniment of
Western and Korean instruments. This is an attempt to make Pansori accessible to non-Koreans and to combine
Pansori with Western ensembles.
2) A different point of view is expressed by those who think traditional music should be left untouched and
preserved in its old forms. The German journalist and music critic Mattiass Entress of Berlin has been
enthusiastically promoting Pansori and has translated the texts into German and is in the process of English
translations. He thinks the original form of Pansori must be preserved without any change:
Also, I don't like any add-ons in Pansori-Performance. Only a drummer and the singer. I don't like this westernopera-version Changgeuk of Pansori and I don't like to have melody instruments as accompaniment to the
singing.

36

Pansori must not be improved. The beauty inside is destroyed if some superficial beauty is added to the
performance. Pansori is the art of inflaming the listener's imagination, it is the art of communication, it is not an
opulent operatic form which overwhelms ears and eyes. Of course I will never allow to amplify the singer. It must
be direct contact. In western theatres the acoustical situation allows this, and in Korea it also would, if one would
turn down the air conditioners
3) Korean-American Pansori singer, Chan-Eung PARK tries to make Pansori understandable to non-Koreans by
singing in English for the Aniri (narrative portion of Pansori) while singing the Sori in the original form in Korean.
Many Westerners appreciate her efforts to make this Korean form accessible to non-Korean speakers.
Related to this idea is a newly created Pansori, Jesu-Jeon (The Story of the Life of Jesus Christ): It was created
in the 1970s by the late Pansori Master, PARK Dong-Jin. The idea came from the late Rev. KIM, Yong-Jun who
was the director general of the Korean Audio-Visual Christian Organization (later combined with the CBS,
Christian Broadcasting Services). He thought that the traditional music should be brought into the Church music
in Korea. This has inspired many musicians and many are trying to use traditional idioms for the church music in
modern society.
To summarize these three approaches: 1) we should merge the tradition with modern genres to create something
new; 2) we should preserve the tradition as it exists without changes; 3) we should modify the tradition in simple
ways that dont alter its essence in order to communicate the tradition with audiences from other cultures. These
examples raise issues that I am sure are being discussed at this conference, as well as by all interested in
traditional music. I think that all three of the above approaches have merit. Perhaps the key factor for us is--what
is the intent of the music? Music is written for many reasons, and those reasons influence the form and character
of the music. Music written for dance will be different than music written for religious service, or music written for
a funeral, or music written for film or theater. For many of us the music we value most has the intention to
communicate meaning--specifically, to communicate what it means to be alive today. Music has the ability to
communicate things about ourselves and our lives that can not be communicated with language. Traditional
music has depth and power because it is the product not of just one person's efforts, but is the product of
countless generations building one upon the next, keeping what they treasure and leaving behind what they find
insignificant. The attempt to convey what it means to be alive today entails the understanding of what it means to
be alive today, and that understanding requires constant study, an inquisitiveness and openness to everything in
the world around us. The first step must be to provide for the preservation of the past. Tradition must be
preserved. With traditional practices reasonably secure, the second step must be to provide a basis for
dialog between the past and the present. While a dialog of words can play an important role in this process, a
dialog of artistic practices cross-cultural collaborations can be even more important. If the tradition is being
preserved, new forms created through this dialogue will also be preserved by future generations if they feel an
important communication of meaning, or they will be discarded if they are felt to be of insignificant meaning.
Again, the essential requirements for this project were these:
1) You must have artists who are committed to the communication between cultures and are willing to experiment
and search for new musical genres and languages; As professor David Evan Jones stated, "The members of
Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea are SO valuable because they are the bridges: their traditional music is
alive not only because they perform it, but also because they bring their experience into dialog with contemporary
European and Korean music. They are the bridges that allow transit between cultures and even between

37

centuries: they allow the past and the future to support and sustain each other.
2) There must be a core group of committed planners who are willing to schedule events, make appropriate
contacts and organize the artists, and take care of those physical elements that must be in place for the
collaborations to take place;
3) There must be cultural support from the institutions of the society, the schools, foundations, businesses and
governments, who are who are committed to this cultural interaction and openness. This philosophy of openness
is no small matter. We believe that a society will thrive and flourish best when it opens itself up to other ideas,
and promotes the free exchange of information to all its members. Like a mountain lake, if there is a constant
cycling of the water from sky to earth, rivers flowing out and rain falling in, the water will remain pure and healthy.
If the lake is cut off and the cycling of water blocked, the lake becomes stagnant, the water undrinkable.
Individuals and societies need the free flowing of ideas to stay healthy and growing.
My position at the University of California was an important part of this process.
I tried to create a framework within an educational institution by which the merging of different musical cultures
can occur in more than a superficial way. It required study and effort, and above all respect for each other's
traditions and aesthetic views.
These ideas, the results of our cultural synthesis project, were perhaps best exemplified by the works presented
by one of the senior members of our project, the eminent Chinese-American composer/ scholar Chou Wen-chung,
Professor emeritus from Columbia University in New York. He came to America as a young man, studied music
composition in New York as the French-American composer Edgar Varse's last student, and has been a strong
advocate for these ideas of cultural heritage and cultural interaction since before many of us here today were
born.
Professor Chou wrote three pieces for the Festival that are different, but related to each other:
1. Korean Ensemble piece, Eternal Pine (2008) for piri, daegeum, saeng hwang, gayageum, janggo,

Written

for the Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea. Dedicated to Korean scholar, the Late LEE Hye-Ku on the
th
occasion of his 100 Birthday.

2. Western Ensemble piece, Ode to Eternal Pine (2009) for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion:
Written for New York New Music Ensemble. Dedicated to American composer, Elliot Carter on the occasion of his
th
100 Birthday.

3. Solo piece, CHANG SONG EUM (2009) for gaygeum (and janggo). Written for YI Jiyoung. Dedicated to
th
Korean composer, the late LEE Sung-Jae on his 85 Birthday.

Upon first listening to these three pieces we hear that they are very different, and their relationship is not easily
understood. But they are very closely related.
Before I discuss composer Chou Wen-chungs own views of these pieces, I would like to share some comments
from the composer, LEE Geonyong, professor at Korean National University of the Arts:

I felt the three versions of the Eternal Pine were all different piecesfor Korean Ensemble, New York Ensemble
and the solo gayageum version. However, the composer says they are three different versions of one piece.

38

Mr. Chou often mentions heritage of the East and the West. What is the heritage of the East? Connected to this
example, I think it meant the mind is more important than the material. I think the people in the West consider
the material more important, so the appearance gets more emphasis. But wisdom in the East teaches us to
understand the Mind beyond the Material.
Talking about the Eternal Pine: If we think about the material, they are clearly different pieces. Beyond that
material element, if we can read the mind, the three pieces are the same piece.

Mind that can see is the

wisdom and the valuable heritage of the East. That was my understanding.
And Professor Chou explained:
"Eternal Pine" for a Jeong ak ensemble is composed out of admiration for the heritage of the Korean Jeong ak
(chamber music): spirituality in character and affinity to nature. It is composed with knowledge of Jeong ak
practice and dedicated to its esthetics. The goal is to make a great
cultural achievement of the past vibrant again with its own language but with modern sensibility.
It is an example of what is needed today. We must revivify cultural achievements around the world to enable a
cross fertilization of cultures for the future of all humanity. To do so, we must stress education in humanities,
particularly the arts.
We must stop emulating recent arts of the west at the expense of revitalizing past heritages of other regions. Nor
should we continue exploiting what are labeled "exotic," "popular," or "ethnic."
We must educate the young about our past in order to create an art of the future for the whole world, the
foundation of which rests on all great heritages of the past. We must initiate a new holistic education in culture to
inspire future generations.
"Ode to Eternal Pine" for modern instruments is composed out of a desire to make "Eternal Pine" more
accessible across cultures today. It illustrates the potential of synthesizing the past with the present. "Eternal Pine
for gayageum solo, CHANG SONG EUM" is still another version for the artist to demonstrate all the subtleties of
this instrument's beauty, so as to tantalize the public's inert musical sensibility.
"This experience confirms my own belief that the only way towards a 'merger' of musical heritages that Ive long
advocated is in the education of composers and performers. I envision the future of music not by seizing it but
molding it.
Humanities studies should be the foundation for the education of the 21st century composer."
This idea needs to be stated firmly. It is these aspects of educating the young in order to create an art of the
future that inspired the theme of the Pacific Rim Music Festival: "Music from the Past, Music for the Future."
Through study, through workshops, through communication of ideas, utilizing the oldest musical traditions and
the newest technologies, along with the cultural sensibilities of all the various people involved, we can create the
st
music of the 21 century that thrives in its tradition and excites in its innovation.

39

40

How to Inquire When the Eye Jumps Over the Wall

: An overview of the current state of knowledge on research capacities in arts education

Ramn Cabrera Salort

Universidad de las Artes de Cuba, Cuba
casalort@cubarte.cult.cu

From an epistemological point of view, as Jorge Gonzlez says, reality is not structured, but prone to being
structuralized; is not arranged, but prone to be arranged. After that he states that reality can be structuralized, but
it is structuralizing. Therefore knowledge depends on the structure of the person who knows.

Inquiring the

current state of knowledge on research capacities in arts education and the way they manifest in the daily
education practice implies revealing a network of relationships. From such a source relations between educators
and educated there spring the contexts of interaction, which constitute the reality of the educational practice.

What reality does the present Latin-American art educator start from, the context I know best, the ambience of
arts and education? And in what way is the resulting investigation determined?
z

The research capacities of arts education teachers and professors are first conditioned by their background
in the arts and their degree of upgrading and their level of comprehension of the symbol process of their
contemporaneousness. The educator is then challenged to submit to a permanent education --the educator
must be educated-- but it remains as challenge, rather than the practice and their outcomes. Generally,
educators, in their formation and habits, run aground in the art canons they reach but do not surpass what
the historic vanguards, the isms from the early last century Europe, later embodied in our America, and
attached to the movements of social-political renewal: the Mexican revolution, university reforms, the rise of
left political parties, etc. have offered. As a result of which, and in the best of the cases, art happens to be
seen basically as an instrument of expression reflecting their epochal conditions or circumstances.

Among the isms there are the ones that join the tendency of figurative representation, also, the
representative tendencies linked to the many abstract realizations, whether geometric or not; and in smaller
proportions such tendencies as the one referring to Dadaistic operations later evolving into

diverse

aspects of arts ranking from pop art and conceptualisms to the fields of performance and the ephemeral
where the dimension ecological, ethnographic or any other become a tool for the realization.
z

From the exposed ideas about art educators assimilate as patterns, there derives a conviction about reality
and the real, where the real and reality is external to and independent from the subjects, and where
objectivity and the objective

stand as opposite and exempted from the eyes and the polluting presence of

the subjective.
z

The above supposition lays the foundations of the traditional criterion of the so-called scientific method of
investigation; as a result of which the deductive hypothetical and experimentation, together with the relieve
figures and statistical resources are the objectivity providers prove the required paradigm for any that
investigation attempt.

CF. Gonzlez, Jorge (Coord.) (2007): Cibercultur@ e iniciacin en la investigacin. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes, Mxico D.F.

41

On the other hand, and based on the false belief that there are no proper and significant experiences,
educators, lack of the adequate knowledge of past valuable experiences by other educators both domestic
and foreign.

As a consequence of the above expressed, there is the fact that in order to know the development of the
research capacities in arts education it is central to analyze what models of arts are the ones that prevail in
school and what types of behaviour they are associated with, as well as the reasons why the historical inquiries
are hardly carried out. At the beginning of the 1990s the arts theoretician Juan Acha had stated that in Latin
2
America there prevailed certain fallacies about arts , that were predominant in the discourse of the media and the

culture industry, and that turned out to be axioms. This does not mean, however, any a priori judgement about the
cultural reality created by them.

Such fallacies were based on taking arts as beauty, as photographic realism, as a feeling or expressivity, as
entertainment, as religious magic. Along with them there results the idea of the goals that drive the artists, and, to
some extent, their qualities they should own or be gifted. Such fallacies provide guidelines for the practice of art
education. They become axioms which are not submitted to any questioning at all, and make the necessity of
investigation superfluous.

And, consequently, such fallacies stand as reasons for taking the need of investigation as superfluous. Art seen
as beauty is, generally, associated with/to a western and classic aesthetic canon. Its teaching, therefore, sticks to
a cultural model definitively superseded in our contemporary symbolic practice. Faced as a photographic reality,
art leads to a reflexive conception, that of art as a mirror of realities rather than as another reality. Instead of
conceiving that in the discourse of art there is something built, which turns out to be its reality and which does
not lead to an external reality as such serving as a model, but the artistic product itself contains a new reality,
which Wolfang Iser called the indeterminacy of fictional texts, since they prove the objects themselves and do not
copy something that already exists.

Assumed as a feeling or expressivity, art, in its discourse, only favors the affective function at the expense of
deteriorating other functions, which are present in the artistic production. Likewise, in taking art as reduced to the
pleasure of entertainment or to its bonds with religious themes and with the primitive ideologeme of magic
virtues makes art in the education practice lose all its critical and cultural values.

So far, this all would seem too generic, if I did not relate it to the concrete facts in the socially-sanctioned field
investigations. When I say socially-sanctioned field, I mean the set of prevailing ideas about what investigation
and scientific are and how to investigate; is expressed by the term doxa, a megasystem of information coined by
the institutions specialized in permanently metabolizing and elaborating the social discourse of science and its
propagation in the whole social body. Hence, the prevailing preconceptions for regulating perception, cognition,
action and evaluation, which happen to be sanctioned by the scientific discourse.

I start from the premise of my personal experience as a tutor, an opponent and a jury for Bachelor degrees,
Master degrees and Ph degrees in Art Education at Cuban and Latin American universities, where the above
mentioned doxa is common and current evidence and where its critique should lead to new investigation
2

Cf. Acha, Juan (1992): Introduccin a la creatividad artstica. Editorial Trillas, Mxico D.F.

42

epistemes.

One of the inconsistencies I have always faced is the prevailing conception of Literature as preceptive, normative,
standardizing, historizing rather than as the heuristic practice of speech and language. As a rule, and in spite of
the fact of its nature of dealing with the art of words, Literature has never been considered as a syllabus in Arts
Education in any of the school curricula. And such a fact determines that when investigating about this subject, it
is procrastinated.

On the other hand, facing Literature as art not only implies emphasizing its condition but also empowering its role
in the being of the students. And such was the major focus of a Master degree paper about Literature from a
personological standpoint by a professor of the subject.

The very nature of the artistic being of the literary led

the researching professor to acknowledge and check that it could be attainable only by means of a teachinglearning process which would cultivate and prioritize the aesthetic and artistic comprehension of the written
language. From this starting point, I later approached the emphasis on the literary uses of literature by the
students themselves, the latter being the literary creators and the on-stage re-creators.

Both investigations

brought forth very significant and conclusive results. Diana explicates the strengths of her proposal in such terms
that may be extended to other areas and disciplines of arts educations. She states, the proposal procures a
conception of literature as an artistic-expressive fact, born by humans need to become further. Therefore, the
apprentice at present should start their own ontological journey. The present proposal aims at motivating the
learner to feel literature as part of themselves and their culture so they could be their expressive device.
The traditional methods consider the teacher and the text/context as information, and, within the classroom, the
only communicators and producers of concrete data. The present proposal is relevant since it suggests the
student should also be an emitter of opinions, of analyses, and of texts, so as to acquire a personal and unique
comprehension by means of a personally relevant learning. Exercising such significant learning, the student will
develop their active role instead of holding on a passive position, not committing themselves emotionally and
intellectually. This proposal aims at transforming the traditional mechanics of a classroom by means of students
communicating and developing their critical thinking, insights and creativity in writing.

The proposed change is that of conceiving literature as an individual experience manifesting the inner life of the
learner. As the learner expresses their experience, their personal referent and their creation drive, motivation
increases, and their emotion readiness for literature becomes more positive. Moreover, by having an emotionally
involved student another result is that learning is no short-termed but a lasting imprint in the learner (Seplveda,
2001, 8).

Something similar did Yliana Iruegas reach with her thesis about learning Literature through drama. This other
dimension propitiated even resonances and made the students, just as in the case of the previously mentioned
thesis, become participants of the birth of literature as a literary art. The academic results both professors had
obtained outstood throughout Mexico in las Preparatorias del Tecnolgico de Monterrey (the senior high schools),
all of which not only represented honor and sympathy towards the professors, but above all also the
3

Cf. Ana Ma. Garca: Un modelo terico para la enseanza de la Literatura en la escuela cubana centrado en el
componente axiolgico. La Habana, 1997, Tesis de Maestra.
4

Cf. Diana Seplveda:El aprendizaje de la literatura a nivel preparatoria, mediante la creacin. Monterrey, 2001, Tesis de
Maestra; Yliana Iruegas: El aprendizaje de la literatura a travs del drama. Monterrey, 2007.

43

acknowledgement the students themselves rendered.

According to the previously referred theses, literature as art privileged such research capacities and methods as
discussion groups, personalized survey, text analysis of the students production. Especially by evidencing the
evolution of the investigation from the students written papers and the realizations of a process manifesting
contradictions, zigzags and outcomes; the validity of arts in education as the basics of a personalized education
students reach through arts.

Another incongruity, which always made itself evident was the necessity of the history. Inquiring proves
impossible if we fail to acknowledge what (previous) experiences there existed prior to ours, what ideas
anteceded us. That is why when the School of Art Educaction was founded in La Habana, in 1985, one of the
dominant aspects about investigation there was the historical research, since putting forward hypotheses about
the current situation would prove misleading, if its background were not acknowledged

Martn Barbero admits

we live a strong loss of sense of history in the interests of the present and its absolute value; and he points out
that it all implies not only damaging the future horizons but also assuming a treacherous loss of memory. And
he clarifies that his point about history is not escaping to the past, but assuming the past which the present if
made of. The point would mean to find, in the past, the clues to identify and decipher the crossroads in the
present, all of which is central in the fields of art education and of the investigation about it.

Together with the urgency of acknowledging the past, there was the fact that forming professional artists and art
educators shared differences and similarities, and that the latter proved superior, in spite of the claims
highlighting the former.

The reason could be the fact that there prevailed a traditional concept of art in the academic standpoint, residual
would say Juan Acha, and in the vision of children graphic art, according to the new times there exist an
expressive aesthetic, it was possible to accept sharp distinctions which, as the paradigms, would become less
contrasting and would lead to other dominant patterns.

A prevailing conception in education research, based on the scientific method of hypothetic deductive, reaches
our present-day master-and-doctoral investigation in Art Education or related disciplines. For example, a thesis
paper discussing the development of creativity in both appreciating works of art and the art production by five-sixyear old children, as a result of having applied the Mc Nemar Test to a sample of 15 children out of a population
of 120 Nursery School goers, in order to assess the system of the controlled external actions. However, I do not
believe such controlled external actions were the protagonists in developing the creativity in the art appreciating
and production, where the pre-conscious and unconscious processes meet with the conscious in its diverse
sensitivity degrees and where intuition, introspection and the axiological reach a particular level. On considering
the sample, the application of case and biographical studies was the appropriate, for the principle of narrating
would prevail as inquiry procedure. Another example, a thesis discussing the appropriate working methodology to
develop drama appreciation/creation workshops with sixth graders explains that markers (identified with letters
and numbers --A1, B1, C1, up to ~10) had been used to refer to such qualities as flexibility, originality and the like.
However, there are no anecdotes, no audio-visual records of the children in action, needless to say the childrens
5

Especialmente por esos aos el texto de Irena Wojnar (1961): Esttica y Pedagoga. FCE, Mxico; luego vendran otros
ttulos y autores, de particular relieve las indagaciones histricas de Ana Mae Barbosa en Brasil.

44

standpoints about what they had been exposed to or playing. Would this matter when validating the
methodology? Instead there is the way the educator grades the manifestations of thinking, feeling and acting. I
believe the methodology has to be verified by the couple teacher-pupil, rather than by the educator and no-one
else. Freire states that The act of teaching, experienced by the professor, is unfolded by the learners as part of
the act of knowing what is taught.

It has to be made visible.

The narration unveils what the child discovers, experiences, and at the same time the goals accomplished in a
aesthetic and organic way with the nature of what is being inquired, and such a narration reveal itself from the
written and from the images themselves. Narrative is an important way of knowledge, and it reveals as an
efficacious investigation instrument in favour of emotionally and vividly apprehending the education facts.
(McEwan y Egan, 2005).

Hence, there rises another question, the prominence of the image as an inquiry method in art education, which is
7
very little acknowledged and very poorly used in our logo-centered culture of investigation. However this does

not mean that any kind of image, as it is usually believed, works as a investigation and exposition methods. The
image should be one that reveals significant moments of what is inquired and should do it uniquely. Usually,
when the image is used, it only illustrates an ancillary view of the inquired object, since it cannot grab and
recognize the cognition component that images carry. In the case of graphic production by children, the very
process of image creation is a process of singular syncretism, which not only refers to the iconographic
component but to a fact of dramatization where body actions, words concur. Around two years ago, I tutored a
Master-degree thesis about the ludic dynamics of childrens the visual and literary expression. There was the
need of using and collecting both photographic records and

journal-writing as

written and pictorial testimonies,

all of which made the textual analysis and the derivation of conclusions sustainable and probatory.

The Master-degree thesis paper by Ana Fabiola Medina, aiming at unveiling the problem of the ludic dynamics
manifested by the graphic and written expressions of children, profusely made use of graphic images and
narrations by children and their analyses, in contrast with other groups of children (from the very city of Monterrey
or other countries, such as Brazil or Denmark), led the researcher to demonstrating arguments, which otherwise
would have remained generic and short of support. Ana Fabiola expressed: As a clear example, we have the
fact that the children from the expressive-creative workshop, coming from an upper-middle class environment,
report their holidays about having been to beach facilities, Disneyland, Los Angeles, or New York. Also their
corsairs resemble cruise ships rather than the actual wooden corsairs even despite the fact that they must have
seen such sail boats on films. Naturally experiences are not referred to by the children from Probaditas who
report their tours and visits to public parks, riverbanks. The comparison made does not aim at scorning the quality
of the experiences lived, the contrast is marked by the family socio-economic conditions. The cultural
environment will necessarily be reflected by the creative performance of the children sieved by their personality
6

Cf. Pedagoga de la esperanza. Siglo XXI editores, Mxico, 1996, p. 77.

Ya Margaret Mead haba comprobado esto en carne propia en su labor como antroploga. Cf. Margaret Mead (1994):
Experiencias personales y cientficas de una antroploga. Ediciones Paids, Barcelona. En un pasaje de este texto se lee:
Cuando planeamos nuestro trabajo de campo decidimos utilizar activamente el cine y la fotografa (). La decisin que
tomamos no parece muy trascendental hoy en da () As tuvimos que esperar casi 25 aos antes que nuestra investigacin
hiciese impacto en la disciplina antropolgica (p. 217).

Cf. Ana Fabiola Medina (2008): La dinmica ldica en la propuesta visual y literaria infantil, Facultad de Artes Visuales,
UANL, Monterrey. Tesis de Maestra.

45

and their expressive capacity, finally the important thing is the fact that if the child has decided remember the
moment and put it onto paper is because the moment has been of great importance for the child. Likewise, there
are experiences the children from the workshop and from other groups, including the young learners from the
municipality General Trevio and the Brazilian and the Danish share: with the same intensity, they all relate a
football match. (Fabiola, 2008, 76).

As Fabiola, at the end of the pragraph, refers to such a sense of intensity in her thesis, it makes itself visible in
the form of graphic images and narrations by the children themselves. And these very images and narrations are
the ones that enable the reader to coincide with her arguments.

Creativity, so frequently associated with Art Education, a capacity ready to develop in every human, demands
culture and learning. And how to conceive such learning and to inquire about it, will always be a challenge. As a
capacity it is a structural component of personality. Creative capacity takes intellectual components cognitive
ones, affective ones, motivational ones, volitive ones, behavioural ones; and they all manifest in a given cultural
field from the entire being of the pupils through multiple channels. Such components manifest through conscious,
pre-conscious and unconscious processes --we should bring to mind L. Kubie or A. Erhenzweig. Theodule Ribot,
in his Ensayo sobre la imaginacin creadora (essay on creative imagination), from which Vigotsky for his
Imaginacin y creacin en la edad infantil, (imagination and creation in child age), notices that imagination
moves from inside outwards, it is regulated by the innermost world, which for him did not mean being
disassociated from thinking, because he believed imagination functioned by means of association and
disassociation of thinking, G. Bachelard states that, contrary to what is commonly believed, imagination is no the
faculty of creating images, but the faculty of distorting images provided by perception, and, above all the power to
free ourselves of the first images.

In Art Education research this all ought to reach a maximum of visibility, so

that the mechanisms of the analogical, the metaphorical and the internal, manifesting from the voice and sight of
the school goers --children and teenagersbecome individual testimonies of the specific potentials resulting from
the dialogical and meaningful realization.

In the academic circles of investigation where I usually take part, I have listened to authors say, creativity starts
the with de formation of a hypothesis. Yet such creativity is very far away from being the artistic one. The artist
does not start from a hypothesis to prove something. The artist, on the contrary, creates hypotheses, possible
worlds. By means of Art Education children can properly exercise such a pleasant quality. The hypotheticdeductive method is not the proper one of the symbolic producer. As Ernesto Sbato says: Language (that of live,
no from the mathematicians), that other living language that is art, love, and friendship, are all meeting-attempts
the ego realizes from its island in order to transcend its solitude. And such attempts are possible as they occur
from subject to subject, not by means of the abstract symbols of science, but the concrete symbols of art, by
means of myth and fantasy: concrete universals. And the dialectics of existence operates in such a way that the
deeper we go into our own subjectivity, the better we reach our fellow being.

10

Of course, in his words Sabato refers to a type of science which has not yet opened to contemporary epistemes
relating entirely anew about the subjective and the objective; that takes into account the fact that ultimately the

10

Cf. G. Bachelard (1993): El aire y los sueos. FCE, Mxico, p. 9 y ss.

Cf. Ernesto Sbato (1991): El escritor y sus fantasmas. Seix Barral, Madrid, p.144.

46

observation units should always be made of pieces of the observable. This means putting aside the conception
of marginalized or excluded subjects from the act of observation. Instead, the action of knowledge, set up during
the interaction and the interpretation of subjects upon object5s, where neither of them can stand alone by
themselves. The observation of the inquired things, therefore, become observable. Maturana, in this respect,
teaches us a lesson when stating that he opposes objectivity to the transcendental vision of objectivity.

Perhaps due to the implication in the current symbolic discourse, the routine, the multicultural, the presence of
new technologies and the realizations of the cultural industry reach such objectivity which shows itself doubly
organic in its here and its now. Only as a result of concretely discovering the ever plural and diffuse reality, where
all objectivity proves mediated by the subjects interpreting it, a comprehensive idea of art in education and the
ways to investigate it arises.
st
Art Education ought to consider the set of qualities for the 21 century art practices Brea points out,

11

among

which the following could be enumerated: admitting that neither artists nor authors exist any longer; that there are
producers only, who are products themselves; that work (intellectual, immaterial, symbolic) produces us; that the
figure of the artist lives in a borrowed time; that there no works of art, but artistic practices; that the artistic
production must not be confused with the object of the form. Every single of such statements presupposes
acknowledging an episteme change related to the symbolic and its production; and similarly about education and
the investigations resulting in making such a challenge possible.

Everything that has been said, however, is nothing more than the expression of a vanguard ideology which is
very far away from the prevailing thought at school premises, among other reasons on account of the natural
phase lag between the symbolic production and symbolic reception.

12

Analyzing the predominance of the

conceptual level, as a feature of present art, and its relationship with the world of daily sensitivity and the
ambience of routine is the work of a long, sharp cultural and educational process and not of an easy and
immediate one. This involves, among other things, understanding how the action of seeing as a natural action is
extraordinarily limited and a deceptive idea. Such seeing ought to start from the very acceptance of the cultural
character, subject to training, to the education of our sensory perception.

13

Also the above is linked with the analysis instruments with which the present symbolic productions can be
understood and judged. Gillo Dorfles, in his Devenir de la crtica (evolution of critique) used to notice how critics
were incapable of understanding the contemporary artistic discourse if they referred to an art history focused in
technique, traditional aesthetic categories or Gestalt peculiarities, as cultural products have their construction
principles based on other epistemes.

14

This also means an even change orientation in art education, which pre-supposes, rather than being conceived
as the object of the elite preservation of tradition and high culture, reaching the stage of the daily, room for the
11

Cf. Jos Luis Brea (2004): Apndice. Redefinicin de las prcticas artsticas (siglo21), en: EL TERCER UMBRAL. Estatuto
de las prcticas artsticas en la era del capitalismo cultural. Cendeac, Murcia, pp. 155 166.

12

Ya Dewey se refera a ello cuando sealaba la naturaleza predictiva del arte, en su El arte como experiencia, o Eco cuando
afirmaba en su Obra abierta acerca de la interlocucin que organizaba el arte con los espectadores del maana.
13

Pierre Bourdieu desnuda tales relaciones de toda mistificacin encubridora en Elementos de una teora sociolgica de la
percepcin artstica, en: Image 1. Teora francesa y francfona del lenguaje visual y pictrico. Criterios, La Habana, 2002, pp.
189 221.
14

Cf. Gillo Dorfles (1979): El devenir de la crtica. Espasa Calpe, Madrid, pp. 26 y ss.

47

media and the spectacular; accepting a new conception of relationship between the present visual creation
searching instant and exciting experiences and the cultural configuration of a new kind of audience for the artistic
culture.

In our Latin American cultural reality, hybrid and mixtured with identities where the popular and electronic
imaginaries combine in audiovisual tales, where oral culture and the imaginaries of the electronic visuality mix.
Art education manifests as a space for the dissolution of what is heterogeneous, diverse, conflictive in pursuit of a
so called unity. With an artistic heritage ritually preserved, as something bequeathed, undebatable, undubious,
unquestionable, top-down spread, unrelated to daily reality, unfit for social use, conceived as cultural-chauvinist
an escape to an imaginary glorious past, art education becomes disabled as a change agent. For this reason,
such a heritage, so conceived, must be questioned critically by the investigation.

Then will become central to its change reasons how to inquire the way to turn art education into a space of dialog
with the cultures of the present and from the world, to go beyond the arts limits, all of which pre-supposes
approach them with a feeling of provisionality, with an evaluation of what is the instant, brief, superficial,
frivolous; with genuine experiences of fugacity and fragmentation of the world, articulator of past and future, of
memory and experimentation, opposing superiority of some cultures upon others; searcher of excluded voices, of
othernesses, and of remainders. Nevertheless, to reach all that, educators themselves ought to educate
themselves and submit their education practice to the investigation.

If contemporarily, arts as a machine of sense ought to be both an inquirer of realities and a presenter of new
ways of seeing, feeling, experimenting and knowing the world, far beyond the first pieces of evidence, the
epidermis of things and perception habits where all interests and concerns doze; art education ought to prepare
children and youth to comprehend and live everything fully with their bodies. And this leads to inquire how the eye
jumps over the wall of what is banal, of what is habitual, of what is inert, lifeless; and to found inquisitive realities,
and more humane.

Ramn Cabrera Salort

Havana, March 2010.

48

Conditions for Facilitating Arts Education Research or The Art of Stepping Aside
Michael Wimmer
EDUCULT, Austria
michael.wimmer@educult.at

Yes, I agree with you. This is not a very thrilling title. So let me offer a subtitle The Art of Stepping Aside which
is not much better but maybe a little bit more mysterious. Maybe you now start to listen because you ask yourself:
What does he mean by that?

We will see. Anyway I will try to do my best and offer you some thoughts which might entwine around the terms
of facilitation, research and arts education.

Facilitation

Starting with the term facilitation I found the following definition:

Facilitation is the art of leadership in group communication. A facilitator is one who fulfils a leadership role in a
friendly social environment. His or her mission is to produce a sense of group cohesiveness. It is about helping
the participants to work together in a mutual cause to produce consensus as a prerequisite of future success.

Facilitation aims to promote a congenial social atmosphere and a lively exchange of views. The idea of
facilitation has become of crucial importance in the context of the so called digital media, when the facilitator in
online communications is fulfilling the role of a social host' and the 'meeting chairperson'. As social host
she/he has to issue warm invitations to people.

Zane Berge (1995) has proposed a widely used classification of facilitating activities under four categories:
pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical.

When talking in the context of arts education let us simply stick to the pedagogical category. According to Berge,
the pedagogical role concerns the teachers contribution of specialized knowledge and insights to the discussion,
using questions and probes to encourage student responses, and to focus discussion on critical concepts. In
addition, by modelling such behaviour, the teacher prepares the students to lead the pedagogical activities
themselves.

In its popular meaning we could say facilitation is about simplifying complex circumstances to enable learning
processes and to raise the awareness of the learner.

Alongside with this term we find pedagogical concepts like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Suppressed or Carl
R. Rogers: Learning in Freedom. Both have in common to change the relationship between teacher and learner
and by that moving the learners at the centre of learning processes, is it in the field of arts education or is it in
education in general.

49

What the arts can contribute

Talking about the need of someone who should provide simplification means to accept that there is complexity
and irritation around. Talking in the frame of arts education you may allow to give the stage for a moment to an
artist whom I want to present you as facilitator in an artistic sense of meaning.

Some of you might know Charles Ives. As an American original he was regarded as one of the first American
composers of international significance. It must have been quite a strange guy, born in Danbury/Connecticut in
1874. He mainly worked as an insurance executive devising creative ways to structure life-insurance packages
for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning.

As a result of this he achieved considerable reputation in the insurance industry of his time, and many of his
business peers were surprised to learn that he was also a composer engaging in a systematic program of
experimental music, with quite complex musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters,
aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century. According to
his wife, one day in early 1927 he came downstairs with tears in his eyes: he couldnt compose any more, he said,
"nothing sounds right."

Charles Ives Unanswered Question

Twenty years before, in 1906 he wrote a short piece of about 6 minutes called The Unanswered Question and I
am going to play some bars for you. It starts with an ethereal sound carpet of string music expressing as he
said the silence of the Druids, who know, see, and hear nothing. Over this indifferent universal background
the trumpet repeatedly poses the perennial question of existence. Wind instruments as the fighting answerers
are reacting but for all their sound and fury, are getting nowhere.

[1 minute of music]

I do not know if you found an answer. Following elaborated interpretations: With this piece Ives encompasses a
philosophical idea, which he was able to address incomparably in his music: in contemplating the sublime
mystery of creation, a question can be better than an answer.

And indeed, remembering the many obtrusive efforts to present answers in the best marketing manner, you can
get tired (and not inspired) about the lack of creativity which is represented in this eternally repeated phrases.

The efforts of a perennial repetition of simple answers may lie in the logic of an advocate. But it can make us
forget, that it is always questions which make our lives a daily adventure, stimulating our curiosity and creativity in
an open universe.

So lets talk about questions

So my point is that the world is about questions (at least more than answers), and so questions might be also the
key for tackling research in the field of arts education (but not only in art education).

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As I am acting as one of the facilitators of this conference I would enjoy not only to produce a friendly social
environment (as the definition says) but also to encourage your reactions and to try a little experiment. To make
this work, the spatial circumstances are at least sub-optimal.

Prousts Questionnaire

I remember another artist, Marcel Proust, who with la recherche du temps perdu produced his own literary
universe. He also was one of the most prominent persons to answer a questionnaire which then became Prousts
Questionnaire. It is a questionnaire about one's personality.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an
English-language confession album belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter of future French President Flix
Faure, entitled "An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc." At that time, it was a fad among English families to
answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the taker.

Proust answered the questionnaire several times in his life, partly considerably changing his answers but always
with enthusiasm.

A similar questionnaire is regularly seen on the back page of the Vanity Fair magazine, answered by various
celebrities. In October of 2009, Vanity Fair launched an interactive version of the questionnaire, which compares
your answers to various luminaries.

Now it is your turn

The questions are Fe your favorite virtue, your favorite qualities in a man, in women, what you appreciate most in
your friends, your idea of misery, but also your favorite poet, painter or composer.

And I would like you to get in touch with your neighbor for just two minutes to talk about your thoughts on the
question: Which kind of reform do you admire most?

(2 minutes of discussion in the audience)

Thank you very much. At this stage I have to disappoint you in two ways. On one hand there is no chance to
make all of us acquainted with your reactions. On the other hand having had a look in the French album, Les
confidences de salon ("Drawing room confessions"), in which Proust s reaction is published, there is just empty
space.

Instead of that I found a fascinating reaction on another issue, on the idea of happiness, which is often mentioned
in the context of arts education.

Marcel Prousts reaction is quite astonishing: I am afraid to be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid
of destroying it by speaking it. (in this respect Proust was more sensitive than some school administrators of
today, offering a subject called happiness within the school curriculum)

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After this little excursion in the artistic field I try to come closer to the point, and this is research.

Three dimensions of reseach

When talking about research I assume that you with your manifold professional backgrounds might have quite
different connotations in mind.

Starting from that definition we could look at research from three different view points.

Scientific research

To what we might think first is an understanding of research as a scientific method to search for knowledge or
any systematic investigation to establish facts. The primary purpose for applied research (as opposed to basic
research) is to discover, to interpret and to develop methods and systems for the advancement of human
knowledge on a wide variety of scientific matters of our world and the universe.

Primarily we identify research as a scientific method which provides scientific information and theories for the
explanation of the nature and the properties of the world around us. Nevertheless it can make practical
applications possible.

Scientific research takes place in different academic and application disciplines. When it comes to facts and
figures this is also true in the field of arts education which can be regarded from quite a variety of viewpoints of
different scientific disciplines.

Coming myself from the heart of Europe I cannot avoid to start by mentioning that there is a long philosophical
th
tradition in Europe to deal with the arts. It was mainly the German idealism of the 18 century with its strong bias

towards hermeneutic which fostered interpretation as a philosophical method to make a broader understanding of
works of art possible. This might have been one of the starting points of arts education.

On the other end of the spectrums there are all the pragmatic methods of social sciences and also cultural
sciences producing mainly qualitative results in terms of efficiency and utility (the keywords are learning in the
arts, learning through the arts,)

Output And what about input

As we learned just before by Howard Gardner, most of these analyses have a strong bias towards output.

From the viewpoint of a decision-maker it might seem astonishing that there is far less scientific research on the
political, economic, social, technological framework in which arts education takes place particularly when it
comes to comparisons between different communities, regions or states and their individual priorities. As a result
of this research deficit we know almost nothing when it comes to facts and figures in terms of input (is it in terms
of public or private funding, man power, facilities,.).

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EDUCULT Fact finding mission

This structural deficit would be seen as a considerable professional weakness in other political fields, when Fe a
lobbying group is pushing for more resources but nobody can provide data how much resources are already
spent. As far as I see there is almost no transparency in terms of resource provision and distribution and
consecutively there are no adequate facts and figures for respective decision making processes.

Under the title Fact Finding Mission and with the support of the European Union my institution EDUCULT is at
the moment preparing a scheme how arts education can be made transparent also in terms of resource input
with the medium term goal to produce comparability is it among institutions but also between public entities (at
least in Europe).

Art-based research

We all agree that scientific research with its different disciplines can play an important role for quality
development and professionalization in the field.

But as we all know not only science can produce knowledge. The arts as a mirror of the world can be equally
used for the production of knowledge. We are familiar with the arts in the forms of painting, composing, writing,
singing, acting, filming or dancing.

But there is also a research dimension when arts production takes place. There is a statement of Pablo Picasso:
I never made a painting as a work of art, its all about research

Based on this statement a new discipline appeared which we might call: art-based research. This new artistic
research approach can be defined as the systematic use of the artistic process, the actual production of artistic
expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience
by both artistic researchers and the people that they involve in their studies.

These inquiries are distinguished from research activities where the arts may play a significant role but are
essentially used as data for investigations that take place within academic disciplines that utilize more traditional
scientific, verbal, and mathematic descriptions and analyses of phenomena.

The domain of art-based research, which can be seen as a more focused application of the larger
epistemological process of artistic knowing and inquiry, has come into existence as an extension of a significant
increase of studies researching the nature of the art experience in higher education and professional practice
(McNiff).

Research-based learning

Turning from the artistic field to the pedagogic one we can easily identify a research dimension within educational
processes. But first of all we have to take into account that we as participants of this conference are coming
from all parts of the globe might have very different ideas about what defines a good school

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Many of us have received Ken Robinsons interpretation of a traditional school as a child of the industrialized age.
And maybe all of us have realised that the way school systems are organised with their narrow curriculum split in
50 minutes unites is the most ineffective way to produce learning outcomes.

For more than hundred years there are efforts to change school systems and reform them according to the
necessities of contemporary societies.

Is it under the label of progressive pedagogy, alternative schooling or the implementation of a new culture of
teaching and learning. The intentions are similar:
The direction goes from a teacher oriented school to a child oriented school. As already mentioned in my chapter
on facilitation this school is about giving children the responsibility for learning, to give them the chance to make
their own learning experiences and consequently to make them researchers themselves. The role of the teachers
then changes from an almighty knowledge provider to a facilitator of common research processes.

Ordinance concerning a holistic-creative learning culture at schools

One of the senior administrators of the Austrian Ministry of Education, Culture and the Arts, present at this
conference made it clear that I would not get out of here alive if I did not mention an Austrian ordinance
concerning a holistic-creative learning culture at schools that was published as a guideline for schools last year.

It is full of sentences like: Communication, interaction and procession of information and knowledge require skills
which can be essentially acquired through methods of autonomous, holistic competence and through projectoriented as well as interdisciplinary learning or It is the task of any school to promote students in their entire
personality and development of their talents. As a kind of motivational text it paints an outline of a school in
which a research-driven new culture of teaching and learning takes place.

Nevertheless I do not want to hide that also in my country there is still a long way to go to bridge the gap between
claim and reality.

Cultural Explorers! EDUCULT and its accompanying evaluation

But there are examples of good practice around and I would like to present you one of them.

24 schools in eight different German cities take their students, teachers, and at least one external partner on a
research expedition into culture. Based on students questions and with the help of teachers and experts from
media-related professions, music, arts, libraries and other cultural institutions, each school develops its own 2 year Cultural.Explorers! project. The idea is to establish long-term collaborative ties with external partners that
will continue to exist beyond the duration of the programme.

Working on their projects, children and young people act as Cultural.Explorers! themselves observing everyday
phenomena with a fresh outlook and gaining new knowledge about cultural phenomena in their immediate
environment. Each school implementing its project idea receives extensive support in terms of scientific advising,
professional development, and networking opportunities with other Cultural.Explorers! schools. They also
receive financial support.

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The accompanying evaluation by EDUCULT aims at the systematic analysis of the programme and the
generation of models for practice. Dialogue between the ones involved and the joint learning process is at the
centre of the research process.

To explain also the method: A mix of qualitative and quantitative methods ensures that all questions relevant to
the evaluation are dealt with. Dialogue and exchange is key: For example, EDUCULT conducts round tables with
teachers, partners from the arts and culture and pupils. Also, a text-based survey taking place twice among the
teachers is designed in a way that it can be discussed and worked on in a team.

Thus, we do not only receive important data for the evaluation, but we also initiate a reflection process. Other
parts of the research are: ongoing monitoring with the process tutors, questionnaire-based survey among the
pupils and school directors, observations, school visits, analysis of the Cultural.Explorers! text books. Regular
presentations and interim reports ensure that the results can be integrated in the ongoing work process.

Interconnection between science, art and pedagogy

Triangles are my favourite geometric figures.

In our case and in summarizing the three dimensions of research - I would like to draw a triangle which consists
of three corners namely scientific research, art-based research and research-based learning.

Scientific research

Art-based research

Research-based learning

The figure should make clear that research is not just a method of professional scientists to produce elaborated
knowledge. Also the arts can contribute a lot and of course the learner him- or herself. So what I want to express
is that research-driven arts education takes place somewhere inside the triangle.

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By that research becomes a professional approach, an attitude of each arts educator. It is a way of looking at the
world, of maintaining curiosity in a world that is increasingly beaten down by answers.

The importance of playing But what does playing mean?

Arts education as we know is highly action driven: In contrary to the dominance of the cognitive subjects students
in arts education have the chance just to do something, is it singing, painting, acting or playing. This is fine also in
terms of pedagogy (which necessarily has to do with learning) when it opens up common ground for
experimenting and searching for new experiences and solutions.

But we should keep in mind that playing is more than unconscious acting. Let me explain that with a music
example

There is a saying of the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek, who intensively wondered about music education
throughout his lifetime. In this context I found a quotation saying that playing music does not necessarily lead to
better listening

What he wanted to express is that playing music is not just about stupidly repeating notes but equally about
listening to what you are playing and in which way you are doing it.
His point was that you have to add something when you are playing. To make music you have to equally listen to
what you are playing, and to reflect on it.

You may object that this figure is a kind of virtual bilocalisation; Inside of the game with your full heart and at the
same time finding a place outside to reflect on the circumstances under which you are acting.

You are right: But it is something we can learn and what we necessarily have to learn; is it in cooperation with
external scientific researchers, is it in cooperation with researching artists or with our own research capacity.

My point for this conference is: Learning how to make use of research (and to integrate it in our professional
approaches) is maybe the most important task we have to fulfil to get out of our marginalized situation.

Without research no understanding

As far as I see this combination of acting and reflecting is the main mean to produce understanding.

Coming back to Proust and his questionnaire: One of the questions was: For what fault have you most
toleration? -

His answer: Those that I understand.

My reaction: If we want to make use of arts education in terms of fostering tolerance in a world of diversity we
have to primarily work on a better understanding. And therefore research seems to be of utmost importance
The art of stepping aside or The artist as a role model

At the end lets try to find a solution for the enigmatic expression from the beginning:

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Combining acting and reflecting is what we can learn exemplarily from the professional arts field. Artists are
researchers by profession: Is it the artist painting his or her picture and than stepping aside to look at it; is it the
musician practicing and listening at one phrase again and again or is it an author re-writing and re-thinking his or
her thoughts on and on. They are the examples of good practice acting in the research mode all the time.

These practices in the arts make evident that the contradiction between inside and outside is unsolvable and it is
up to us to make it productive.

Credits

To make a long story short: What I really wanted to say in my contribution is and that is the message I want to
leave you with:

Facilitating art education researches means making all of you facilitators and integrating the research mode in
your everyday professional life.

For your respective efforts I wish you good luck.

And may the music of Charles Ives with its last phrase of the Unanswered Question inspire you.

Thank you for your attention!

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Roundtable Panel Discussion I

The implementation of the Road Map - its phases of appropriation, comprehension
and investment towards the construction of the regional observatory of arts
education for Latin America and the Caribbean
Olga Lucia Olaya
Ambar-GIEA, Colombia
olgaolayambar@gmail.com

Since year 2006, as a result of the circulation of the road map for worldwide art education drawn among the allies
attached to UNESCO, we have found possible principles and actions. Today, four years after its circulation and
implementation we must move from enunciation to action, we need to enable the social transformation that art
education promotes, and its high incidence in quality education of the XXI century.
We have a common ground, from which we must build a knowledge field that is flexible and dynamic but
nonetheless not less rigorous. This field of knowledge must try to generate theoretical and practical thinking
about the reflection on art and cultural education that we have been working on. We are facing the possibility of
working in perspective, from a wide-sensed horizon, where arts go beyond the reflection of their practices and
ways of doing, towards the ways of being in specific contexts. We want to make possible the implementation of
transformational processes in the individual creative capabilities and the capabilities to coexist peacefully and in
harmony with nature as well as the fact that we should bet on recognizing how to undertake new solutions to the
problems of contemporary society.
This is why the invitation I would like to make through this round table, around the reflection of the next step after
2006 road map, is the materialization of the union of global and regional wills, with the binding commitment, on
the premise of state policies, not government policies, from the different ministries of education and culture, with
the sum of the efforts of multilateral organisms, and the efforts of the civil society through their networks and base
organizations.
This sum of forces should embrace a platform of collective investment, towards a regional fund that allows to
gather efforts, investing in the consolidation of the Art Education Observatory on a regional level, characterized
as an information center, that collects, analyzes, processes and spreads information and knowledge on art
education.
Important efforts have been made to collect information but it is needed to have articulation of forces between
educational institutions from pre-school, Basic, medium and higher education and even non formal and informal
education to make a trustable cartography on how we operate; what are our research interests, how we develop
processes of pedagogical, curricular and methodological systematization and even impact evaluation of
programs and projects in the field of art education, that comprehensively contemplate the approach to children
and youngsters in training. This is why this important challenge should present the stock of letters that show the
intention of current governments to develop sustainability plans for 15 years, where it can transcend to an
operational and real follow-up with reports of annual advances. And with true impact on the target population:
children, youngsters, teachers, artists, managers and entrepreneurs of the art education field that bet on the
contribution to quality education for the XXI century.

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Implementation of the Road Map for Arts Education: Teachers Voices

Emily Achieng Akuno
University of KwaZulu-Natal
akuno@ukzn.ac.za

Cultural expressions, as part of indigenous economy, are part of indigenous education. They are a significant
aspect of human existence, and so they need to be a significant aspect of human education. These are the arts.
Many countries worldwide have separate administrative portfolios for education and for culture. Often, the
policies guiding practice in the two ministries are different, so that there is a gap between them in practice.
While art as culture entails preservation, enhancement and propagation of cultural expressions, arts education is
concerned with knowledge and skills transmission in the cultural expressions. Often, culture focuses on the arts
utility, value, economic significance and practice, while education uses these to justify learning in the arts. If these
two worked together (and where they do work hand in hand), what difference would (does) it make?
This can be gauged from an examination of the manifestation of the arts in education.
countries, the arts are drama, dance, music, fine art etc.

In several Africa

Often in performance situations, music, dance and

drama are intertwined. In school, the arts are present in the taught curriculum evidenced by the syllabus,
subject grouping and time-table allocation. They are also evident in the experienced curriculum, through the
festivals and competitions. In both instances, the teacher is a facilitator, expected to be knowledgeable about the
arts in order to transmit knowledge and skills. The teacher is also expected to be cognisant of the national ideals
for arts and for education.

Where there is policy in education, implementation is not successful without the

teachers input.
This presentation reports results of engagement with selected teachers in discussion of what really goes on in
school under the umbrella of arts education, by way of exploring the hows of the implementation of the Road
Map for Arts Education. The pertinent points cover:
1.

Teachers awareness and understanding of the Road map and national policies for arts education;

2.

Teachers preparedness for arts education;

3.

Teachers perception of their role in arts education and

4.

Teachers efforts in facilitating learning in the arts.

The results of these findings lead to recommendations on practical ways of ensuring pupils benefits from an
education in the arts.

Education on art, a utopia for some

Leila Rezk
Dialogue XXI, Lebanon/University of Lyon 3, France
leilarzk@inco.com.lb

Several indications reveal that for certain countries, both politics and culture have allowed uncertainty to persist
on the viability of adopting the 2006 Road Map for Arts Education.

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In an environment in which States do not align their legislation and national practices with their international
commitments, notably regarding human rights, we can raise the question of the impact of the Lisbon
recommendations.

We could also raise suspicion on the legitimacy of ways that presumably encourage a creative society sensitive
to cultural specificities, when entire groups of people across the world hardly enjoy any cultural freedom. There is
also the disconnect existing between the objective which attempts to make arts education a factor of personal
development, and the difficulties people often confront in asserting themselves as well-adjusted individuals.

The thesis is based on the example of inter-religious societies in which the State rarely encourages initiative
taking and the development of creation, criticism or even personal aptitudes; but in which civil society uses
original avenues in order to get beyond cultural reluctance and free an imagination and a creativity surrounded by
the constraints of traditions and beliefs.

The implementation of the Road Map for Arts Education, a policy-guiding document
for arts education practices
Dr. Christina Hong
Queensland University of Technology, Australia/New Zealand
Christina.hong@qut.edu.au

The UNESCO Road Map for Arts Education provides a comprehensive and well sign-posted document for
educators, artists, and policy makers networked across the globe, to both collectively and individually, shape,
build, and enable diverse learning journeys that foster creative futures in the arts.

I intend to speak to two of the key themes of the Road Map:

The value of arts education

Just as our manifold written and spoken languages and dialects reflect who we are as peoples of various nations,
so the arts speak to our diverse cultural heritages and identities. As we learn about the arts, we also learn about
our past and our present. As we learn to make and convey meaning in and through the arts, we come to know
ourselves, to interpret the world, and to share experiences with others. The arts are essential to the development
of every child and adult as they provide the means by which we come to communicate our ideas, our feelings,
and in essence, declare our humanity. As such the arts are essential components of a basic education for all of
our young people.

Creating futures through the arts and enterprise

As the Road Map states, 21st century societies are increasingly demanding workforces that are creative, flexible,
adaptable, and innovative (p. 5). Countries are increasingly drawing on the resources of their creative sectors to
develop strong and sustainable cultural and creative industries. A radical rethinking of the role of cultural
production in many parts of the world has brought the cultural and creative sector from the margins and into the
spotlight of government policy and local attention. Arts education and the opportunities for our young people to

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learn in, through, and about the arts has for many societies never been more accessible. The arts are in large
part - everywhere.
This shift in thinking, this impetus towards a creative workforce with flexible, adaptable, and innovative capacities
presents our education systems and arts educators, artists, and policy makers with a significant paradigmatic
challenge. Arts education for today must be different from arts education of the past - because the goal post has
shifted. In a world of contingency and change, the partnering of the arts, digital convergence, and enterprise is,
for example, disrupting our traditional ways of thinking, knowing and communicating. If the climate for the arts
out there seems potent and with the Road Map as a central organiser, arts education programs need to evolve
to encompass not only the development of the ways of knowing that the arts avail, but also the development of
the skills and dispositions of creative enterprise and related habits of mind.
In summary, if we consider the arts to be vital to the heartbeat of our nations and therefore essential to general
education, then arts education ought to be conceptualised, not only of value in and of themselves, but also as an
enterprise that enables our young people to learn about, explore opportunities within, and make meaning of, the
indeterminate circumstances of the 21st century.

Roundtable Panel Discussion II

The reinforcement of socio-cultural dimensions of arts education in the promotion of
cultural diversity, social cohesion and society issues (Advocating the socio-cultural
values and impact of arts education)
Iman Aoun
Ashtar Theatre, Palenstine
Iman_aoun@yahoo.com

The role of Ashtar Theatre in creating a platform of debate in the Palestinian society paving a way for change:

At ASHTAR Theatre we see ourselves as action oriented, stimulators of change, by helping our
community to make a leap, a turning point and a change in their praxis.

Using forum theatre to enhance dialogue within our community around controversial issues, taboos,
and unspoken subjects.

Offering the spect-actors a chance to express themselves freely, listen to each other and tolerate their
differences.

Allowing them to experience their ideas practically and be aware of their role in making a change in the
society.

Thus Our Motto Is: Free and Creative Palestinian Individual.

We believe that in order to achieve our national freedom we have to help our people to free themselves
at their inner level first.

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Freedom can only happen when dialogue is established. Thus in our work we establish dialogue
among our society, in place of the dominant monologues imposed on us politically, socially and
economically.

We provide a platform for our audience to help them combat the personification and the
characterization of their oppressors.

Theatre, is an art of transformation; so for transformation to happen, the oppressed should realize that
he/she has a role in braking the visious circle of oppression. Because oppression is a chain that
entangles both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Therefore liberating the oppressed from the state of reversiveness, through action orientation in place
of re-action, is very essential.

Hence, I will present three examples - success stories - that indicate the essence of my debate :
The initial program of Ashtar Theatre 1991
The psyco-social program at schools 2004
The Gaza Mono-Logues 2010
The training in Yemen.

Cultural policies, arts education and audience development

Lucina Jimnez
International Consortium for Art and Schools (ConArte), Mexico
lucinajimenezlopez@gmail.com

A crucial contemporary theme for reflection and debate is the recognition and exercise of cultural rights for
millions of citizens, as a central objective of public policies in the cultural sector.

In some countries, these rights have been consigned to national legislatures, but there is still much to do to
guarantee that they are put into practice. However, its not enough to recognize cultural rights in terms of
access to cultural goods and services in order to obtain a qualitative change in the relationship between
citizenship and cultural policy and to construct cultural democracy.

The point of entry for citizens to fully realize their cultural rights is through artistic education, as long as the
knowledge, appropriation, expression and communication through the artistic languages is a condition for
partaking in cultural life, not only as consumers but also as creators of contemporary culture, even when
there are no

pretensions to become an artist. Becoming a quality spectator also occurs through a complex

process. Publics are formed, not born.

z

The creation and broadening of publics for the arts and cultural activities constitute one of the major
challenges for the 21st Century. Artists, cultural promoters, producers, sponsors and supporters, networks,
public and civic institutions are increasingly more aware of the possibility for sustainable development in the

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artistic fields and disciplines and equally aware of the sense and reason for a diversity of cultural spaces,
which in turn depend on the existence of critical, diverse and participative publics.
z

Conventional cultural policies have been in tension for several decades, due to the profound transformation
that the technological revolution has brought into cultural practices and the new forms of perception and
reading for children, adolescents and young people. Giving priority in a pertinent and inclusive way to
artistic education, taking into consideration the cultural diversity with the aim of creating cultural citizenship
with a capacity for intercultural dialogue through art; these initiatives presuppose deep changes in the
priorities and structures of public and private cultural policies.

The socio-cultural dimensions of the transformational elements of arts education in

the promotion of cultural diversity, social cohesion and societal issues for societiesin-crisis
Dani Lyndersay
University of the West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago
danielle.lyndersay@sta.uwi.edu

Caribbean nations represent a confluence of cultures from the four corners of the eartha unique combination of
ethnicities, nationalities, languages and topography. These island nations have a cultural complexity that has
spawned a creative energy and a natural ability which has produced indigenous perspectives and practices in the
arts that are specifically Caribbean and non-Western, gaining international recognition and replication, (for
example the musical and artistic forms

steel pan, reggae, rapso, dance hall, calypso and carnival).

Unfortunately, not all members of the communityyoung or oldhave the opportunities or the exposure to the
healing opportunities that the creative arts encourage. This most evidentially is due to the increasing crises
associated with crime and violence (often drug related); communal and gang warfare, and the consequential
disruption in family life; child abuse, domestic violence, gender inequalities and male under-achievement and
so on.
In order to give young people and their supporting and connecting communities an opportunity to dialogue and
re-address social challenges, the Department of Creative & Festival Arts and a number of its outreach
programmes, most specifically Arts-in-Action, have recognized that the art of doing and bringing the truthvisibly
and viscerallyinto their lives can naturally unify and integrate the community. Transformational arts, such as
drama and theatre, must transcend cultural and temporal boundaries, for as Bertolt Brecht so many years ago
declaredthey must break down the fourth wall and transform audiences into active participants if they are to be
pro-active and not just participants in escapist theatre experiences.
Most recently incorporating the process of a collective exploration through research, improvisation and the active
partnership and collaboration with an inclusive range of communities, a product was created in order to unlock
memorythe memories and experiences of the 1970s Black Power Movement. This product engendered a
renewed vision of history in order to take a responsibility for tomorrow. With its episodial structure, its fusion of
languagesEnglish, Creole, Hindi, song, chant, refrains, calypsos, conversationas well as its incorporation of
the immediate environment and the audience into the action of the history being played out, through an

66

interactive promenading journey, a fusion of a number of beneficial arts education social cultural values was
experienced. Participants reported a greater awareness of civilization and their history; an increased appreciation
of cultural differences, and recognized the truth which had been suppressed. The awareness and therefore the
judgment to source ways of formulating, giving shape and finding a creative solution to societal issues was and is
perhaps the most formidable result. This will ultimately have implications and significances for our unique arts-ineducation and education-in-the-arts agendas which will be difficult to ignore: namely their transformational quality.
Our responsibilities as facilitators of this process must be truthfully acknowledged and given genuine avenues for
sustainability.

Advocating the socio-cultural values and impact of arts education.

Jan Jagodzinski,
University of Alberta, Canada
jj3@ualberta.ca

My response is related to the Road Map for Arts Education that emerged during the first World Conference on
Arts Education in Lisbon, 2006.
The first point I will be making concerns the nature of creativity. I agree that it is the heart of the human being
and therefore also agree that culture and education sectors need to acknowledge the value of arts education in
promoting creativity, innovation and worldwide spread of cultural diversity.

However, I will be arguing that there

is a distinction to be made between creativity as zo and bios. The life-force of creativity as zo is being hijacked
by what I refer to as global designer capitalism, which does not further a more healthy earth, nor a healthier way
to live. I will be arguing that the aestheticization of everyday life, that now brings with it the concern for arts
education as visual culture education, has taken away the force of art to reveal insights as how to live that are
drawn from (marginalized) wisdom cultures.
The second point I will be arguing is that there is a tendency in arts education to turn cultural diversity into
culture-ism where identity is being essentialized and hardened rather than understanding arts education
contribution to culture and identity as always in the process of becoming, by that I mean constantly changing. I
claim this to be a way of managing cultures for marketing purposes, a form of postmodern racism to be able to
compete on the world market, once more hijacking creativity.
The third point I wish to make is the fear that I have that the social and environmental potentialities that arts
education has to offer are also being packaged and hijacked by a new fantasy of saving the world. I will briefly
illustrate this with James Camerons recent blockbuster film Avatar as a new postcolonial fantasy.

My fourth point is to make the claim that arts education should be asking what the arts can DO rather than
confining our energies to arts which are there simply to be interpreted, hung on the wall and so on. I am calling
on a re-orientation of arts education that brings out its force to affect us by understanding the arts from the
prospective of a changed Kunstwollen where performance, video, installation have become the new art forms.

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My final and fifth point is to advocate creativity through an arts education where the messy and unclean side of
students lives is examined: their anxieties and resistances that tap into their unconscious where creativity as zo
hides. Time permitting I would juxtapose artists who do the same.

Roundtable Panel Discussion III

Research on Arts and Culture in Education
Eckart Liebau
University of Erlangen-Nrnberg, Germany
eckart.liebau@t-online.de

The deficits and open fields of research in arts and culture in education are immense.

More research is needed

in almost every field of arts and culture in education. All the following aspects must be interpreted on local,
regional, national and international level.

There are four main methodological approaches to be further

developed:
-

Basic research (theory of arts and culture in education; terms, definitions, concepts)

Empirical research (quantitative and qualitative methodology)

Historical and comparative research (history and development of arts and culture in education in
different cultures)

Pragmatical research (project-development, evaluation etc.)

In my opinion the following aspects are most relevant:

a) Basics:
-

Definition of quality of concepts and practices

Distinction between the different sections of education in arts and culture and their special needs (music,
dance, theatre, visual arts, literature etc.)

Relations between high-culture approaches and everyday-culture approaches in the different sections

Relations between productive and receptive approaches in the different sections

b) Pedagogy and Didactics

-

Distinction between the different sections and their impact on competencies (artistical, social, political)

Pedagogical and didactical approaches in the different sections

Differentiation between the different phases in life

Voluntary commitment or duty of participation

c) Context
-

Distinction between the respective actors and programs (formal, non-formal, informal contexts)

Teacher education (through and to the arts) and pedagogical education of artists; education of cultural
workers

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Economic and political interests and impacts

Political strategies

The review of current state of knowledge on research capacities in arts education and their
practical applications (Supporting the practical use of researches)
Lindy Joubert
UNESCO Observatory on Multi-Disciplinary Research in the Arts; The University of Melbourne, Australia
lindyaj@unimelb.edu.au

The UNESCO Observatory at The University of Melbourne applies a holistic approach to the use of arts
education. The interactions can only be managed for improved outcomes if their affects can be quantified,
therefore, the UNESCO Observatory through its Cultural Villages project over fourteen countries aims to:

Measure the performance and impact of the arts on community development and health outcomes

Provide research opportunities and integrate individual performance into a wider sphere

Use this knowledge to make a valuable contribution to the impacts of the arts in a multi-disciplinary
arena

Further develop this relatively new area of research internationally

Develop Knowledge Transfer initiatives in line with the University of Melbourne agenda.

Successful research initiatives have highlighted the fact that in Asia and the Pacific and across many developing
countries research and evidence supporting the benefits of incorporating the arts in formal and non-formal
education is scarce, anecdotal and difficult to access.

Even in cases of successful design and implementation,

arts education programs in formal education and arts programs in communities run by NGOs often fail to convey
their theoretical assumptions or fail to document their outcomes. There are therefore few best-practice case
studies which can be used to support advocacy processes.

This lack of a readily accessible body of information

is deemed as a major setback for improving practice, influencing policy making, and integrating the arts into
formal and non-formal educational systems across schools, institutions and communities. Arts Education in
developed countries has its problems but overall it is in a much better state than the regions we are most
concerned with here.
Importantly, there is a need for better research and knowledge-sharing in the field of arts education. Qualitative
research methods are particularly appropriate in order to reflect the richness and complexity of Asian, Pacific,
African and others realities and cultures, in particular to describe the role of non-formal actors such as artists,
local artisans and holders of traditional knowledge. At the same time, quantitative research is also necessary to
explain the linkages between arts instruction and intellectual and social development of mainstream and at-risk
children and young people in a more general and non context-specific manner. Clearly there are real benefits
when the arts are integrated into the curriculum as established and supported research programs show.

Issues

relating to multi-disciplinary learning and teaching of the arts with the humanities and sciences; and the
application of these theories highlight the practical outcomes.

Apart from the obvious benefits to students of

holistic and versatile educational programmes, teachers are empowered as agents of change and have
enhanced opportunities to provide a quality education and outcomes-focused curriculum development.

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Within the research field of arts education

there is a tremendous range of approaches, styles and outcomes

responding to a wide variety of conditions.

For the future productivity of arts in education communities it is

important that achievement is both excellent in quality and socially responsible. Also, research can be most
effective when operating in or engaging with multi-disciplinary teams. This mode of thought supports the need
for the holistic, symbiotic education developing all aspects of human potential. This theory of multi-disciplinary
learning to accentuate and fulfil the capacity of human multiple intelligences, can be applied directly to the
curricula across countries where the arts in all forms are a major part of each countrys cultural experience and
imbedded in the psyche of each individual. These extraordinary artistic cultural differences need to be celebrated
and implemented more soundly in the educational experience.

We need to address the dilemma of changing

thinking about education in the arts by establishing a design based research process.

This approach reveals

the gap between aspiration and current reality and highlights the obstacles. If creativity is, among other things,
a social process, then the qualities of a particular environment or place matter.

Surroundings, both the

immediate environment and the macro-environment can affect not only the creative capacity, but also the
likelihood of realizing the individuals full potential.

The review of current state of knowledge on research capacities in arts education and
their practical applications
Robert McLaren
CHIPAWO (Zimbabwe Academy of Arts Education, IDEA), Zimbabwe
mshengu@mango.zw

Zimbabwe, as with other countries in the Southern Africa sub-region which have introduced the performing and
fine arts into the school curriculum, is not able to implement fully owing to among other things a lack of capacity
to train teachers to teach the courses. In 2005 the Zimbabwe Academy of Arts Education conducted a UNESCOsupported research project designed to produce a national teacher-training model for basic arts education in
schools. It was acclaimed by participants and ministry officials. It was never implemented.
This research project, which if applied might have gone a long way to facilitating the effective introduction in
schools of the arts curriculum, serves as an example with which to illustrate the characteristic research/practical
application dialectic in the sub-region.
My own experience in arts education in Africa is defined by four aspects of arts education: theatre work with
actors from Nambia and South Africa; tertiary theatre arts/performing arts teaching at universities/academies in
South Africa, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe; and Informal arts education with children and young people in Zimbabwe
Basically it reflects perhaps the pattern of arts education in the sub-region, which could appear different, perhaps
even unorthodox, to arts educators and researchers in other regions for example, the relative importance of the
informal as opposed to the formal component.
In the context of the sub-region, arts education research takes perhaps four forms.
There is experiential research by practitioners, largely in the informal sector. Informal arts educators and their
institutions derive and develop their theory and method, let us say, their pedagogy from their practice. This does

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not necessarily make their research any less valid or coherently articulated. The advantage here is that the
practical application of the research is supported by and implemented in the very processes that conducted the
research in the first place This is not to say that practical application faces no constraints. It does.
Then there is a form of arts education research which consists in the sharing of experiences, approaches and
theories by practitioners at conferences and workshops. A significant example of this was a series of workshops
and meetings involving ASSITEJ, UNESCO, the Southern African Theatre Initiative (SATI), the Zimbabwe
Academy of Arts Education, universities, arts colleges and various informal arts education organisations from
Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. A number of useful
publications emerged from this process, including the book Ngoma: approaches to arts education in Southern
Africa.
Academic research - university dissertations and publications probably primary in some other regions, is
relatively weak in the Southern African sub-region and subject to many constraints. An example might be
Sheasby Matiures Performing Zimbabwean Music in North America, a published thesis from Indiana University in
the United States. As with this one, dissertations are often not even available in libraries of the same university
where the author teaches. Though initially published research was foreign, there is an increasing involvement of
indigenous researchers in various departments in Faculties of Education at universities in the region.
Publications written by nationals are beginning to appear, thus making findings more accessible and generally
more appropriate and therefore more capable of effective practical application.
The practical application of these researches is mainly channeled through teaching by researchers at their
respective academic institutions as their students are primarily lecturers at colleges of education or teachers of
the subject in schools.
Factors impeding the practical application of research in schools seem to revolve around lack of resources and
the status of arts education in the syllabus and in the community. Often trained teachers exist in the school but
they do not teach arts education subjects.
This situation is ameliorated in private schools where more resources exist and the administration attaches
importance to arts education. A side effect however is the growing gap in arts education between government and
private schools (see Eric Homes research in South Africa ) and where arts education subjects are taught, a
continuing constraint is the hegemony of foreign and even colonial paradigms.
Thus the practicality and reliability of research are affected by the fact that research and theory outside the region
is not readily known or accessible, by the newness of the research tradition in the region, by the emphasis on
research on arts practice rather than education, by indigenous academics/scholars/practitioners preferring to
consume rather than produce/write/research and by a poor or fragile resource or institutional base.

There is a need for research to ensure that the pedagogy of arts education in the sub-region is indigenous,
diversified, appropriate and relevant. In this regard, the two UNESCO conventions, Safeguarding Intangible
Heritage (2003)and Promotion of diversity of cultural expression (2006), go some way towards filling the gap as
they involve the researching and compiling of inventories of oral traditions, traditional expressions, rites and
rituals, traditional craftsmanship etc.
The existing practical application of research suffers from the lack of capacity of governments to implement as

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well as the restricted scale of arts education institutions, from the shortage of resources and the low status of arts
and arts subjects with school administrations, parents and communities. Nevertheless, despite the weakness of
research infrastructure, there is much innovative practice in the sub-region, predominantly evolving from the
informal sector.
Possibilities for the expansion and improvement of research and its practical application include advocacy and
education on the value and importance of the arts and the need for arts education research, greater accessibility
of research findings, the creation of relevant integrated networks, a stress on the vital importance of indigenous
knowledge, arts and culture and hence traditional arts education models such as intergenerational transmission,
initiation, games and stories plus their application in formal arts education by making it available to teachers, the
need to identify custodians of these and introduce them effectively into formal arts education, encouraging
informal arts educators not only to teach but also to research and publish on how they teach, integrating the
practical research of the informal sector into formal arts education and improving government partnerships with
non-governmental arts educators.

How and with what objectives should we develop research capacities in evaluation
practices in the area of arts and cultural education?
Jean-Marc Lauret
Ministry of Culture and Communication, France
jean-marc.lauret@culture.gouv.fr

The paper will be structured around three observations:

-

First observation: Research is limited to the observation of the effects of arts education mechanisms on
small groups of children. It seems that no research has yet been done on the evaluation of public policies.
This situation is paradoxical since the purpose of such research is often to justify the need to reinforce the
role of artistic and cultural education in public education policy. The paper will present some avenues to
remedy this state of affairs.

Second observation: Most of the time, research in the area of arts education aims to set forth the extrinsic
effects of arts education, and to establish cause-effect relationships between arts education mechanisms
and school performance, in particular in the so-called fundamental subject areas. The paper will question
the presuppositions of this research and will set forth its limits. It will open new research perspectives
aiming to illustrate the continuities between the involvement in an artistic practice and the other areas of
human experience.

Third observation: The paper will also underline the necessity of developing research on good practices in
the area of arts education, highlighting the links between the two meanings of the word evaluation: that
which designates the questioning of the effects of a mechanism, its effectiveness and its efficiency; and that
which questions the values that guide a pedagogical initiative or policy.

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Faceted Glossary for Art Education

Sam Gyun Oh
Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
samoh21@gmail.com

By nature art education is diverse. It embraces activity genres, objectives, art subjects, partnerships and locales,
among other things. Such multifacetedness of art education presents obstacles to the formation of homogeneous
definitions of concepts across the field. Differences in languages lead to further complications. Consequently it is
extremely challenging to identify information, let alone share and appreciate best policies and practices in art
education. In other words, the absence of information gateways that would enable mutual understanding and
information sharing equals to lost opportunities for productive and substantial collaborations among institutions
and countries. Such gateways are yet to be established. At present, there are not enough studies suitable for
benchmarking. A good, standardized gateway is a requisite if we are to cope with and benefit from this age of
information explosion where the content of art education is no exception.
As a springboard for that gateway, we propose a glossary with a few purposes in mind. It is hoped that the
glossary will be a primary source for practices and policies relevant to the critical issues of each institution or
country, and as such will facilitate the analysis and dissemination of the best in the field. The glossary is also
likely to be a highly valuable learning tool for users who may check main concepts or terms to familiarize
themselves with the domain of art education.
We have relied on faceted classification in the construction of this glossary. Facet signifies the main attributes,
perspectives, scopes or characteristics of a domain. It is therefore ideal for representing the diversity of art
education. Our domain analysis suggests 13 facets in the field. They are countries, activity genres, objectives,
arts subjects, financial support, actors, target groups, activities, education, resource types, pedagogy,
partnerships, and assessments.
We further propose the use of an ontology language in the implementation of this faceted classification as it will
significantly enhance the collocation of related concepts. Ontology language permits meaningful associations of
the 13 main facets, while brining other relevant resources within the context of those relationship links.
The creation of an international framework of communication for art education serves to clarify different attributes
and perspectives in the field, and to open the door to a broad exchange of ideas. Such international collaboration
will facilitate more effective realization of values, reducing cultural gaps between-and within-countries.

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