Learning – Engagement – Research

The department at the Institute for Art and Education is concerned with processes of learning, mediation, appropriation and co-creation of cultural production. The aim of our work is to cross hierarchies and question boundaries in order to foster cultural production and educational work from diverse forms of knowledge and modes of perception.

The core of our activities is the development of critical diversity literacy and reflective practice in art/education - in the context of schools, in museums and art spaces, in cultural and educational institutions or independent projects. Key elements for this endeavour are an intersectional understanding of social difference and inequality, post- and decolonial theories, a notion of identity and gender based on discourse theory and performativity, a concept of culture shaped by cultural studies, a (social) constructivist approach to learning processes as well as artistic processes and approaches to critical, engaged pedagogy.

The department´s courses are part of the teacher training programmes and closely interlinked with research through action research methodologies. The aim is to create spaces in which students, artists and educators can research their own pedagogical practice and thus generate options for dealing with problems as well as make this knowledge production available for other practitioners. In the action research workshop we cooperate with cultural and educational institutions.

Current priorities in research, development and teaching are: the coloniality of art education, pedagogies dealing with a globally networked cultural production characterized by entangled relations of inequality and the crisis of planetarily unsustainable modes of living, as well as the possibilities of artistic strategies for shared spaces of dissent.