null Two open lectures on art education 8.2.



ArtsEqual together with CERADA present two open lectures, the first by visiting professor Helena Gaunt and the second by professor Allan Owens.

Date: 8th of February

Place: Helsinki Music Centre Auditorium

Free entrance, you are warmly welcome!

16:30-17:30

Visiting Professor Helena Gaunt: Vision and disruption in professional education: distilling the value of artistic practices in order to connect to wider worlds, and renewing conceptions of practice in specialist higher arts education

We are at a turning point for the arts in society. A contemporary zeitgeist is recognising tectonic shifts in the nature and scale of the challenges we are facing in the world and that the arts provide a unique and vital part of meeting these challenges. They are shifts that fundamentally call for the creativity, humanity and reflexivity of the arts to help us make sense of and respond to them wisely. The unique dimensions of the arts have a critical role to play in unlocking our creative, collaborative and ethical potential to meet the almost unimaginable social, environmental, cultural and political challenges that characterize contemporary life.

This means that there is a growing opportunity to leave behind a place where these disciplines gradually slip into more peripheral or self-referential positions in society, and steadily to grow a revitalised and essential place for them in all our lives.  The ambition is unapologetically ambitious. Worldwide events of 2016 demand it. This presentation therefore focuses in on some key issues that will underpin our ability to deliver on the vision. It will consider professional education in the arts from two interconnected perspectives:

•          Essential dimensions of performing and fine arts practices that may be relevant as we connect these disciplines more widely in society, in new contexts.

•          An approach to renewing professional education in the arts which is designed to deepen and extend these dimensions, and so support emerging artists at the highest levels to professional integration and sustained career development.

17:30-18:00

Pause

18:00-19:30

Professor Allan Owens: Creativity and Democracy in Education 

The struggle to establish more democratic education pedagogies has a long history in the politics of mainstream education. Professor Owens uses research in practice to explore creativity conceptually, historically and metaphorically within a variety of UK and international contexts, which are analysed using political and social theories of democratic and relational education. The lecture is based on Owens’ recent book (co-written with Jeff Adams) Creativity and Democracy in Education: Practices and politics of learning through the arts (Routledge 2016). The book argues for the significance of the creative arts in the establishment of social justice in education.