Arts and cultural education is one of those rare subjects on which almost everyone agrees about the words and almost no one about what they cover. I am asked to speak sometimes to put meaning back into a scheme that has become routine, sometimes to help artists and teachers talk to each other, sometimes to address the question of evaluation that poisons every end-of-year report. Here are the directions I can take, to be discussed according to what is at stake for you.
First direction: counting, or accompanying?
Arts education is almost always evaluated in numbers of beneficiaries and hours. Those figures say something about public effort, and nothing about what happened to the people involved. I propose a talk that takes this problem head-on and provides tools: what can be observed, what can be collected, why a situated account is worth more than a spreadsheet, and how to produce traces that serve participants and funders at the same time. This direction draws on Media Literacy : Should We Judge or Guide ?, on Evaluating Arts and Cultural Education from the Artist’s Perspective, which comes from a course at INSEAC, and on Towards voluntary evaluation of cultural projects.
Second direction: the artist who enters a classroom enters a society
A classroom is not a neutral container into which an artistic proposal is deposited. It is already a society, with its places, its hierarchies, its alliances, its exclusions. The visiting artist arrives in a position of domination, whether they want it or not, and that position is working material rather than a discomfort to be ignored. This is one of the talks where I see the most movement among artists, because it names what they experience without saying it. It draws on School is already a society and You are in a position of domination. Now what ?.
Third direction: the instruction, and what we do with departures from it
Methods are not details of execution: they decide what the project authorises. The way an instruction is given, the welcome given to whatever departs from it, the time left to someone who is stuck, the place of the person who makes nothing, all of this produces or prevents the emancipation the scheme claims to aim for. A very concrete, very practical direction, which works well with mixed teams of artists, mediators and teachers. It comes from The Meaning of Mediation Methods in Arts and Cultural Education, When the instruction is not followed, Respecting Instructions and The One Who Makes Nothing.
Fourth direction: arts education and cultural rights, two worlds that gain from talking
Cultural rights force arts education to face an uncomfortable question: are we transmitting a heritage to people assumed to lack it, or are we organising an encounter between cultures, of which theirs is one? The answer changes the objectives, the partners and the evaluation. A useful direction when a local authority is writing or revising its territorial plan. It draws on Educating about images, organising disagreement, on the section Cultural rights and on the talk Conference : « EAC and cultural rights : convergences to be identified and implemented ».
Fifth direction: arts education that survives the cuts
Many arts education projects are fragile because they depend on one earmarked grant, one person, one calendar. I have formalised an antifragility method for cultural projects, and it applies particularly well here: designing from the outset what will remain if the grant disappears, if the artist changes, if the teacher is transferred. See Build antifragility for cultural projects and Cinema workshop for absent children in Gonesse, which recounts a scheme designed this way.
What happens in the room
I have the group experience what I am talking about, because talking about methods without practising them produces agreement, not transformation. Depending on the time available, this can be a collective close reading of a short text, a moving debate where you physically take position according to what you think, timed exchanges in pairs, or a very short creative instruction whose effects on each person we then analyse together. These methods are documented in Collective intelligence facilitation methods.
What remains
The contributions written during the session stay online, on a platform we host ourselves, and become raw material for the work that follows. When a network or a territory is involved, this material often becomes a shared document, sometimes a common text drafted during the day itself.
Formats and preparation
An hour and a half as an opening, a half-day with workshops, or a full day designed with you. I always prepare through video calls with the organisers, to adjust the direction to the real subject, which is not always the one in the initial request. It also happens that the right person to carry this message is on your side, an arts education coordinator, an associate artist: I can support them in designing and giving the talk themselves [see the page “What if someone from your team did the talking?”, to be linked once published]. Talks are given in French and in English.
Some past talks
Image Education and Citizenship : When Youth Professionals Rethink Their Practices; Design of a professional day on « Artistic and digital practices for young people »; Working with Artists in the Social Field; Collaborative assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine.