Drama Tuesday - The Qualities of Quality Arts Education
/
2022 Taiwan International Symposium on Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic Education, 12 November 2022
This seminar is a practical outcome of Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic Education, a country-wide educational project sponsored by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan. The project is designed
“…to develop and incorporate Arts-centric interdisciplinary courses into the curriculum at all K-12 levels within Taiwan’s education system. The main approach undertaken by our program is to design interdisciplinary courses—which have Arts at its core—for non-Arts subjects, in order to incorporate various elements of Arts within, thereby fostering and elevating students’ aesthetic literacy and creativity”
Today was the culmination of thinking and writing about the markers of quality arts education – a long term research focus I have developed.
We negotiated the challenges of recording the presentation, setting up the links on Google Meet (two screens including presentation and translation screens on separate devices). But it has been a fruitful and happy collaboration.
What is notable about the program in Taiwan is the links being actively made between arts education and aesthetic education, between arts and wellbeing in the broadest sense of the word. There are important lessons from the arts in schools for the wellbeing and health of our whole society. This is a theme picked up by Larry O’Farrell in a paper at the IDEA 2022 Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he shared the work of the Canadian Network for Arts & Learning (CNAL) (https://www.eduarts.ca) and the role of Arts Education for personal well-being, themes that I have written about with colleague Peter Wright (2014). Attention must be paid to the research on the links between arts education and health and wellbeing (see, for example, Fancourt and Finn 2019). This will resonate with the themes of the seminar and next phase planning for Arts and Aesthetic Education in Taiwan.
The notion of the qualities of quality arts education draws on the concepts of a Project Zero publication of the same name (Seidel, Tishman et al. 2008).
A copy of the final paper can be found below:
Bibliography
Fancourt, D. and S. Finn (2019). What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being? A Scoping Review. Health Evidence Network Synthesis Report, No. 67. Copenhagen, World Health Organisation.
Seidel, S., S. Tishman, L. Hetland, E. Winner and P. Palmer. (2008). "The Qualities of Quality: Excellence in arts education and how to achieve it." from http://www.espartsed.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/pz-qofq-executive-summary.pdf.
Wright, P. and R. Pascoe (2014). "Eudaimonia and creativity: the art of human flourishing." Cambridge Journal of Education.
