EXPECT_Art (EXPloring and Educating Cultural literacy Through Art) utilizes an approach to cultural literacy that is informed by critical pedagogy and decolonial theory. This is operationalized by a community-based research design, including art-based methodologies, involving children, teachers and citizens directly as research participants. The research design consists of three interconnected parts: Researcher Art Exploratorium, Community-Based Art Exploratoriums and Cultural Literacy Hubs. The project will be implemented through field research in 12 schools and local communities in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Spain and involves research institutions and cultural and creative industry partners in each country.
Critical cultural literacy
In the decolonial and critical perspective of EXPECT_Art, the aim of strengthening cultural literacy takes the everyday lives of citizens as its starting point. This implies being aware of the power structures characterizing the local contexts in which everyday life unfolds. In the project, school practices will be developed in connection to the lifeworld of children, and artistic and cultural expressions already present in the local communities of children and youth will be taken into account with the aim of furthering cultural literacy. By doing so, EXPECT_Art moves beyond an instrumental understanding of education as a site for providing cultural literacy to the children, who are assumed to lack such a literacy. Instead, cultural literacy is promoted in two distinct ways.
Firstly, the project is based on a notion of critical cultural literacy, which rests on the assumption that people are always already culturally literate, and that their everyday lives are already saturated and shaped by cultural and artistic forms of expression. Drawing on insights and perspectives from sociocultural literacy studies, multiliteracy studies, critical literacy studies and critical pedagogy, the attention is shifted from cultural literacy understood as a competence inherent in people to something that arises between people and is related to the power dynamics and hegemonic discourses embedded in the specific context, within which people live their everyday lives.
Secondly, by adopting a critical cultural literacy approach, the project challenges distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures and includes within its scope a variety of cultural genres and repertoires, such as street art, hip hop and other subcultures, community projects, maker activities, socially engaged projects and so on. The research design is informed by community-based research and critical ethnography, which implies that the exploration and development of cultural literacy is perceived as a bottom-up process that acknowledges and values the cultural literacy of all children, youth and adults, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, class or race.
Objectives
Identification of existing measures and barriers for critical cultural literacy in arts education, education through arts and uses of arts in education at the national and local levels through secondary data analysis and the study of existing practices through fieldwork
Exploration of the impacts and potentials of decolonization of arts education, education through arts and uses of arts in education to foster critical cultural literacy, by conducting in-depth case studies of schools and local communities in six countries applying critical ethnography and community-based research in Art Exploratoriums
Development and dissemination of interventions and workshop formats for enhancing critical cultural literacy through formal and informal arts education.
Partners:
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- Syddansk Universitet, Denmark
- Aalborg Universitet, Denmark
- University College Absalon, Denmark
- Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia
- University of Barcelona, Spain
- University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany
- University of Wroclaw, Poland
- Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont, Hungary
- Institut for Bornekultur, Denmark
- Portret, Slovenia
- E://ART, Spain
- Kinemathek Karlsruhe, Germany
- Wroclaw Institute of Culture, WIK, Poland
- Insite Drama, Hungary
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Website: https://www.expectart.eu/