Lisbet Skregelid – författare

Education, mental health and the arts all share a concern for human beings and for how they live their lives. Living one’s life, and living it well, has always been a challenge – life never simply happens. But what the particular challenges are, differs from time to time, from location to location, and even from individual to individual.In both education and mental health there is a strong pressure to think of being human as a technical problem that in some way can be ‘fixed’ by powerful, research-based interventions. Also arts are quickly turned into an instrument for fixing problems. While such fixing may be possible, and may appear to be quite successful from one perspective, it clearly runs the risk of turning students and clients into objects – things to be acted upon, rather than human beings to encounter and act with.This book stages conversations between art, education, and mental health around the question of what it means to be human today. Moving beyond the suggestion that this requires ‘strong’ educational or therapeutic interventions or can be resolved by means of individual expression, the chapters explore new possibilities for 'the arrival of I’.

An introduction to pedagogy of dissensus.A pedagogy of dissensus is informed by the dissensual characteristics of art. The book includes both theoretical foundations and examples of how the theory is unfolded in different contexts ranging from educational practice to arts-based research. Motivated by the author’s long-held interest in the role of art in society in general and education in particular, it is a vital new contribution to arts-based approaches to education.Referencing philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Rancière, Gert Biesta, Dennis Atkinson, and Helga Eng, Lisbet Skregelid demonstrates why art matters because of its ability to create necessary disturbance and resistance in education. In this book, she argues that art has something to offer education because it challenges existing norms, has no definitive answers, and contributes to new ways of seeing both oneself, others, and one’s surroundings. Placing art at the center and enabling dissensus in education can contribute as a contrast to the dominating policy led by economic ambition and competition.