A year giving a voice to art at school

Socially engaged art

We are very happy to share the collaboration that we have been developing for a year with the Diario de la Educación in Spain. As a result of this, the blog Art and Education has been born to give a voice to people, groups and projects, which link both topics.

Art is not only an object of study in the educational system, it can be a very powerful tool for rethinking content and methodologies in school. That is the intention of the blog Art and Education that we have made in collaboration with the Diario de la Educación.

Betting on art and education

The relationship that each person has with art varies depending on the family or social environment, or our origins, producing inequalities in terms of access and enjoyment, but also indifference on the part of institutions with respect to certain cultural practices. At the Foundation, we want to fight against these inequalities by strengthening access to and transmission of art, in all its forms, both in France and in Spain. To this end, we believe that education and mediation are two multiplying levers to promote projects that respect diversity and to reinforce the place and role of art in individual and collective development.

Our “Art and School” line of action aims to generalise artistic and cultural education within the framework of compulsory education. Through field projects, in France and Spain, we encourage the experimentation of pedagogical initiatives that include the entire educational community.

In France, we have therefore launched the PEGASE pilot programme with the Académie de Versailles to generalise the presence of art in public schools and institutes.

In Spain, we will intensify our work by articulating a network of schools and institutes that put the arts at the heart of their school project. Conceived as a pilot, this network will bring to light practices with the potential to transform the state’s educational landscape in a lasting way. In the same way, we have been supporting more than 25 field projects in relation to Art and School.

Why create this blog with the Diario de la Educación?

These projects are often not easy to make visible due to the “gap”* between the educational and artistic worlds that means that both areas do not usually give each other the attention they deserve.

We hope that this collaboration with the Diario de la Educación, which has always been committed to making visible the specific power of art in the context of formal education, will be an exception to this panorama.

This alliance arose in 2018, a year of reflection for the Foundation, in which we also launched a process of collecting and exchanging learning between the Art and School projects that we support. It is a project that also fits fully with the strategy of our Citizen Art line, and more specifically with our Art and Education program.

*Megias, Clara. Invisible pedagogies.

In Spain, we have been supporting art and school projects for 6 years and the teachers have taught us that the opposition between the two worlds is not sustainable. Deep down, art and school share the vocation of making us more sensitive, more capable of understanding our world and of imagining alternatives. We have seen schools transformed from the bottom up by the power of the intersection of art and education. We believe that this must also be present in the media to make these transformations visible and viral.

Carlos Almela

Head of the Citizen Art program in Spain

Some exemplary initiatives

Many of the articles in this blog are based on testimonies of projects that we have been supporting, but also on other initiatives. For us, the most important thing is to put the spotlight on those who work on a day-to-day basis in the field, and to share their practices to give them a voice, expand and generalize them.

In the blog, we wanted to attend to the variety of ways of doing Art and School and collect the testimony of teachers, artists, educators, institutions…

For this reason, the articles cover scenarios as diverse as artists’ residencies in schools (such as Luz Broto’s at the IES Doctor Puigvert or María Jerez’s at the CP Beato de Rojas), Art and education events and meetings (the Foundation’s Art and School Meeting, Allez! seminar at the MACBA), educational resources accessible anywhere (mobile museums such as the MUMO, cinemas on wheels such as Puck cinema, mail art projects such as Posdata), active methodologies (such as LÓVA) and even useful readings to build initiatives (Expanded Education of ZEMOS98, or Art is a way of doing (not a thing that is done) by Andrea de Pascual and David Lanau) and mobile suitcases.

We have learned that the presence of the artist (whether in the flesh, or through a powerful work) is crucial, and that a real collaboration with the teaching staff, with the problems of the center, with its organization, with its way of working, as well as its curriculum, in the long term, is decisive for the success of the projects.