Arts and Cultural Education in a Challenging and Changing World

This book is motivated by questions of how arts and cultural education—like all other fields—are affected by and—together with other fields—can contribute to glocal developments, challenges, and shifts. However difficult the times, arts, and culture in educational contexts have the ambition to make a positive contribution and foster creativity, empathy, and inclusion to encourage critical change, innovation, and peace. But if arts and cultural education remains traditional, unchallenged, and exclusive, those ambitions for critical change towards more inclusive practices that dare to act and make a change in the world, run the risk of remaining utopian rhetoric. It is time for a critical self-examination and willingness to change powers and privileges also within arts and cultural education.

Against this background, this book presents brave research on arts and cultural education that offers insight into the conditions, contexts, effects of, and critical changes needed within arts and cultural education. It addresses our time’s great changes, challenges, and possibilities for innovation.