Following the Exmouth Arms Talking Shops in May and June you are warmly invited to come along to the Autumn meetings on the last Wednesday of the month starting next week 26th September (see dates and address below.) Each meeting will be structured round 3 speakers with half hour each for presentation and discussion.
How can we take a more active stance within art education in response to recent and imminent changes with the restructuring, cuts and job losses that come in their wake? These seem to have caught us on the back foot with an apparent schism between theoretical radicalism and our ability to act collectively. Our aim is to establish a forum to encourage communication and solidarity between those working across the various sectors of art education, in order to increase our confidence to act and speak within these different contexts. The monthly meetings are intended to open up a space in which to promote exchanges increasing awareness what is going on across the sector, foster new allegiances and suggest strategies for resistance and reassertion of our collective responsibility for art education. Promoting the intrinsic value of art in schools, colleges and universities, and defending art as a subject of study available to all is central to our concerns as are working conditions and workplace democracy conducive to the best art education.
Issues to be addressed :
– Implications of the for-profit sector in education
– Working conditions for art teachers and the role of the unions
– Teachers’ agency in what and how they teach
– The operation of educational and occupational standards setting bodies and private exam boards
– Current intensification of the issues of who will be able to participate in art education and making
– Widening participation and refusal of conformity and exclusion in art education
– Art education as a critical and contesting force
Autumn dates
Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, 1 Starcross St, Euston, NW1 2HR. http://goo.gl/maps/Roh7O
6.30 – 8.00pm
Wednesday 26 September
Wednesday 31 October
Wednesday 28 November
NEXT MEETING
Wednesday 26 September, 6.30pm:
Neil Chapman will talk about a couple of cases where institutional policy has had a detrimental effect on teaching and employment, focusing on relations between bureaucracy and teaching communities in Higher Education. For discussion he will propose how these cases might be addressed and ask how our art education community could work to help with this.
Andrew Cooper will talk about recent curriculum changes in the school in East London where he works as an art teacher; overcoming obstacles to solidarity; and how we can make art practice, art education and discourses around these, part of a movement that takes into account its own reproduction as part of the struggle.
Christabel Harley will talk about the Art and Design Widening Participation programme she developed with Jane Hagger, over a number of years of working closely between Central St Martins and local secondary schools.
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