Category: Art Education

Dear curriculum leaders, lecturers, students and study specialists!

Teaching and study programs at EKA have received a very good evaluation from our graduates, but – keeping the curriculum at a very good level is a constant challenge. The curriculum in higher arts education is a comprehensive network of activities during which students shape their approach to creative practice. Designing learning paths and creating an inspiring learning environment in higher arts education is an art in itself. Questions like: what are the new approaches to the curriculum? How to create, find new and effective approaches to the formation of a creative practitioner? How to create a whole? Are waiting a response.

At EKA, we have conducted two curriculum analyses, from which we see the challenges at our curricula. Several curriculum teams have carried out systematic development in cooperation with the Department of Art Education, and based on this experience and in order to meet the challenges of curriculum quality, we have put together EKA curriculum development workshop program “The Art of Curriculum Planning”.

Therefore, we invite curriculum leaders, lecturers, students and curriculum support staff to participate in it.

The workshop will be supervised by Maria Jürimäe, lecturer in curriculum theory at the University of Tartu, and Anneli Porri, lecturer in art education at EKA.

The program will take place in two parts, it is important to join both of them:

1. introductory seminar – where we map the possibilities, educate the horizons;
2. practical curriculum workshops in faculties.

Participating in workshops provides practical help for curriculum management, curriculum development and analysis writing.

Let’s start with the introductory seminar “The Art of Designing a Curriculum” on Thursday, 19 January 2023 at 13.00-15.30, room A-501 (3 academic hours).

The aim of the seminar is to create a common understanding and find an agreement on the most important strategic learning goals of the ESA.

ENG will be provided if there is a need.

Please register to first seminar by January 10.

The exhibition “Remake” of EKA Art Education students can be seen on the information screens of EKA from January 14 to February 4.

The works of the art education students were completed within the “Creative project” subject .

Artists: Inga Ausmeel, Liina Oja, Liina Raidoja, Marju Rajasalu, Lilli-Krõõt Repnau, Triin Resik, Tanel Roomere, Piret Suviste, Zhanna Toht, Kertu Tort, Kalev Vapper, Merle Vingerfeld, Viire Jagomägi

Supervised by Anna-Kaisa Vita

The works can be seen on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th floors of EKA and on the screen of the auditorium on the Kotzebue street side. Videos with sound on the 2nd floor screen. 

More about EKA Art Education studies

October 9, at 16.00, room A101

Open Lecture by Jan van Boeckel
Art and Sustainability Education in an Age of Uncertainty and Climate Fear

Jan van Boeckel will give a presentation on fostering attention through arts-based open-ended approaches in an age of ecological emergency and radical uncertainty. If we are to respond adequately to the rapid and deep changes taking place in the world in our current times, we may need to envisage a very different type of education. Not one that is predominantly based on knowledge transfer, but a kind of teaching and learning that foregrounds engaging with radical uncertainty. In more open-ended modalities of education, learners tend not to know on forehand what the outcomes and expected deliverables will be. Such approaches may cause a sense of unease because of a presumed lack of control, of missing framing guidelines and clear target objectives. It is exactly in this space of vulnerability that it is essential that learners feel that their educational experience is safely contained and held by teachers and facilitators. A way of achieving this may be through employing arts-based approaches. Through such practices of artful exploring (for example together with a group of students) a sense of excitement, of curiosity and wonder may be prompted.

One of Van Boeckel’s key areas of interest is in educational activity as primarily and fundamentally an open-ended process. The outcome is not given, though the participants follow certain sequential steps which frame the process. Through teaching and hands-on doing, it aims to promote understanding of interconnected systems – both biological and cultural. Van Boeckel contextualizes this form of arts-based environmental education by valuing it as a form of ‘poor pedagogy’, as articulated by Jan Masschelein. Such practice is expressive of a view on education that is not about the transmission of knowledge but rather is a way of attending to things (Tim Ingold). It is also ‘weak pedagogy’, in which is foregrounded what Gert Biesta regards as ‘the educational imperative’: to arouse in another human being the desire to exist as subject, in dialogue with the world. For him this means being ‘in the world without occupying the centre of the world’, trying to exist in dialogue with what and who is other.

Exactly because artistic activities and research, as part of this kind of education, aren’t prima facie linked to urgent themes such as climate change – that they may lend possibilities, affordances, to take up such subjects in new ways. For, on a meta-level, they can also be seen as exercises in facing complexity, uncertainty, not-knowing, and of discovering and forging new relationships between phenomena and processes, in ways that are often far from obvious. Van Boeckel suggests that it is precisely this element of sustainable education (Stephen Sterling) we need, if we are aiming to equip new generations with skills to live in ‘postnormal times.’

Jan van Boeckel is an artist and art educator who has worked for many years on the intersections of art, education and ecology. He was professor in art pedagogy at EKA from 2015 until 2018. Before he was a teacher at the Iceland University of the Arts and other places. In academic year 2018-2019 Jan worked as senior lecturer in art education at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and as visiting lecturer and teacher on the themes of art, sustainability and climate leadership at the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) in Uppsala, also in Sweden.
More info: www.janvanboeckel.wordpress.com

The lecture is in English, attendance free.