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The Seoul Agenda: Goals for the Development of Arts Education was unanimously endorsed by all UNESCO Member States in 2011. It is the only existent policy paper of global relevance on arts education. It provided the frame of reference for an international inquiry into arts education experts' perceptions of key issues in the field: access and participation, quality, and the benefits of arts education. Nearly 400 experts from 61 countries around the world participated in this research. The book presents findings, commentaries, and reflections contributed by 51 international scholars and expert practitioners.

Drawing on recent theoretical frameworks from critical disability studies and art education including normalcy, ableism, disability and Crip theory, this book offers an analysis of the conceptualisation of ability in art education and its relationship with disability. Drawing on the work of Cizek and Lowenfeld in Austria, Ruskin and Richardson in England and Dewey and Eisner in the United States, it critically examines the influence of ideas such as the dominance of vision and visuality; the emergence of psychological perspectives; the Child Art Movement; the implications of assessment regimes; and the relevance of art education as a critical social practice on the production of disability. Offering a sustained inquiry into the differential values attributed to learners and their work and the implications of this for framing our understanding of disability in art education, this book shows that although art educators have frequently advocated for the universal appeal and importance of art education, they have done so within historical contexts that have produced and determined problematic ideas regarding disability. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, art in education, art history and education studies.

Initiatives to coordinate schools, cultural institutions, community-based organizations, foundations, and/or government agencies to promote access to arts education in and outside of schools have recently developed. This study looks at the collaboration efforts of six urban communities: how they started and evolved, the kinds of organizations involved, conditions that helped and that hindered coordination, and strategies used.

This report was developed from a task force of education, arts, business and foundation leaders to address the question: What knowledge can research create that will help schools and policy makers provide an appropriate arts education to American students? The report recommends that research be conducted on five aspects of student learning in the arts, including: (1) the effects of arts education on preschool children and how that relates student achievement in the arts and other academic areas; (2) the effects of arts education on preparing students for successful work and careers; (3) the effects of arts education on the academic performance of at-risk student populations; (4) the effects of arts education on student understanding and appreciation of the diversity of cultural traditions in America; and (5) identification of the best instructional practices in the arts along with the most effective methods of professional development for teachers throughout their careers to insure the highest caliber of arts instruction. The report also makes five recommendations for the development and dissemination of information to guide education policy makers in making decisions affecting arts education. (EH)

Student access to arts education - and the quality of such instruction in American public schools - continues to be of concern to policy-makers, educators and families. This book examines the extent to which students received instruction in the arts; the facilities and resources available for arts education instruction; and the preparation, work environments and instructional practices of music and arts education activities outside of regular school hours.

Providing a distillation of knowledge in the various disciplines of arts education (dance, drama, music, literature and poetry and visual arts), this essential handbook synthesizes existing research literature, reflects on the past, and contributes to shaping the future of the respective and integrated disciplines of arts education. While research can at times seem distant from practice, the Handbook aims to maintain connection with the live practice of art and of education, capturing the vibrancy and best thinking in the field of theory and practice. The Handbook is organized into 13 sections, each focusing on a major area or issue in arts education research.

In taking the critique of inclusion and entry as a first step, Art’s Way Out’s discussion of art, politics and learning aims to delineate what an exit pedagogy would look like: where culture is neither seen as a benign form of inclusion nor as a hegemonic veil by which we are all subscribed to the system via popularized forms of artistic and cultural immediacy. An exit pedagogy—as prefigured in what could be called art’s way out through the implements of negative recognition qua impasse—would not only avoid the all too facile symmetrical dualism between conservative and progressive, liberal and critical pedagogies, but also seek the continuous referral of such symmetries by setting them aside and look for a way out of the confined edifices of education and culture per se. An exit pedagogy seeks its way out by reasserting representation in the comedic, the jocular, and more effectively in the arts’ power of pausing, as that most effective way by which aesthetics comes to effect in its autonomist and radical essence. In this fluent, limpid, and scholarly work, Baldacchino examines, inter alia, the problem of empathy in relation to art as an event (or series of events), drawing upon a wide and rich range of sources to inform what in effect is his manifesto. With a profound understanding of its philosophical basis, Baldacchino unfolds his argument in an internally consistent and elegantly structured way. This is not a book to be ‘dipped into’, to do so would miss the development of Baldacchino’s philosophical position; like an art work itself, Art’s Way Out has coherent structure, and a complex, interrelation between form and content, reflecting an artist’s concern for getting things right. — Richard Hickman, Cambridge University Although art has a limitless capacity to take on myriad responsibilities, according to Baldacchino we also need to consider a ‘way out’ because only then will we understand how art goes beyond the “boundaries of possibility.” As he explains, “our way into reason also comes from an ability to move outside the limits that reasons sets”. This is the ‘exit pedagogy’ that he advocates. And here exit does not mean to leave, but rather to reach beyond, to extend and explore outside the borders we impose on learning, teaching, schooling and most forms of cultural agency. The need to embrace the capacity of art to cycle beyond the contingencies we impose on it also helps to clarify the limits of inclusive arguments for deploying art education for various individual, institutional, and socio-political ends: art as self expression, art as interdisciplinary method, art as culture industry, art as political culture, art as social justice and so on. This image invokes for me part of the legacy of Maxine Greene that Baldacchino revealed in his earlier text, Education Beyond Education (2009), when he explored her thesis of the social imagination, which is best, achieved when teaching becomes ‘reaching.’ What Art’s Way Out gives us is an exit strategy from the deadening tendency to ignore the enduring capacity of art to give life to learning, teaching and the very culture of our being. — Graeme Sullivan, Penn State University This is the sixth book authored by John Baldacchino, the other most recent books being Education Beyond Education. Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy (2009) and Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt, and Nostalgia (2010). Currently Associate Dean at the School of Art & Design, University College Falmouth in England, he was full time member of faculty at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York, Gray’s School of Art in Scotland and Warwick University in England. Front cover image: Monument to Marx / we should have spoken more (2009) by Mike Ting

This open access edited volume provides theoretical, practical, and historical perspectives on art and education in a post-digital, post-internet era. Recently, these terms have been attached to artworks, artists, exhibitions, and educational practices that deal with the relationships between online and offline, digital and physical, and material and immaterial. By taking the current socio-technological conditions of the post-digital and the post-internet seriously, contributors challenge fixed narratives and field-specific ownership of these terms, as well as explore their potential and possible shortcomings when discussing art and education. Chapters also recognize historical forebears of digital art and education while critically assessing art, media, and other realms of engagement. This book encourages readers to explore what kind of educational futures might a post-digital, post-internet era engender.