BxNU Symposium: In Need of Education
2 & 3 November 2018
In the UK (as elsewhere), mainstream education at primary, secondary and higher level is in financial and political crisis. In particular, the arts and other forms of cultural education are being divested in favour of the ‘hard’ subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths. The right to free, comprehensive education, a key aspiration of post-war welfare state endowment in the UK - is a diminishing mainstream political demand. This symposium asks, given such a context, what can and should education provision by museums and art galleries do and be?
Over two days at BALTIC we bring together education experts, artists, curators and thinkers who have profound experience of working within the fields of education, curating and pedagogy in gallery contexts; and who have differing views of the ways in which arts institutions can and should be used to support and extend education at a local and international level.
Chair
Andrea Phillips (BALTIC Professor & Director of the BxNU Institute of Contemporary Art)
Part 2: School art in the 21st century: Actualities from the artist, the teacher and the academic
Sophie Cole (Senior Lecturer in Education, Programme Leader PGCE A,C&D Northumbria University)
Hanna Shepherdson (Illustration/Graphic Design at Sunderland University, trainee teacher Northumbria PGCE Art, Craft & Design)
Zoe Simpson (Graphic Design at Northumbria University, trainee teacher Northumbria PGCE Art, Craft and Design)
This panel will examine the tensions formed by policy, school and the art world’s expectations of school-based art practice, the journey from thinking like an artist to thinking like an art teacher, and what is relinquished and what is gained in the making of an artist-teacher. In particular it will call for the importance of reciprocal gallery-school and gallery-teacher (trainee) partnerships.