The Art Education Round Table
Presented by Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art with Asia Art Archive
Tuesday, November 24, 2015 | 2:00 – 6:00pm | FICA Reading Room, D42, Defence Colony, New Delhi
The Round Table is a platform that brings together key organisations involved in art education in New Delhi with a select group of independent educators and artists, to share experiences, insights and ideas on their own work and at the future of art education in the country. The focus will be to share challenges faced by educators in developing and implementing art education methods, to relook at the value of art education, examine available platforms for art and cultural learning/exchange and look at possible ideas for the future. The round table will also hope to engage with exploring alternative learning platforms that are being created through the practice of artists and creative practitioners.
For this round table we are delighted to have with us our guest speaker, Susanna Chung, Head of Learning and Participation, at Asia Art Archive. Initiating the department in 2007, she has worked extensively to raise public awareness of the arts in Hong Kong and across Asia through educational projects. She developed the ‘What is your dream museum?’ project that used an innovative approach to open up discussion on the nature of museums in Hong Kong and India, ‘Mobile Library’ project that circulated books in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Myanmar by providing platform for the exchange of ideas through partnership. Susanna Chung is currently Head of Learning and Participation at Asia Art Archive (AAA). Chung has participated as a speaker and moderator in a number of art education forums in Hong Kong, and internationally; including Worlds Together (2012), a conference organised by the Tate Modern, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the British Museum. In 2010, Chung was awarded the ‘Starr Foundation Fellowship’ by the Asian Cultural Council to research audience development and education programmes at various art institutions across the United States. Recently Chung was a recipient of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s Arts Administration Scholarship (2013) for her Master of Educational Studies at the University of Hong Kong.
FICA’s Outreach and Art Education Forum
FICA’s Outreach focuses primarily on two questions – how do we use the art resources that are available in a gallery/museum/library to engage better with the audience; and how can we use art education as an important cultural tool that can extend itself to everyday life? FICA has developed outreach programmes for ongoing exhibitions, the art fair, public art projects an more, all with the aim to diversify the audience for art and cultural learning in India. FICA’s Art Education Forum is a new direction in our continued efforts to engage with education as a life tool. While our focus has always been on art as an essential part of education, we now seek to systematically work towards building art education modules for open access, and creating case-studies on the affects of art education on students to help curriculum-builders. Working with a core group of artists and educators who are already involved in their own projects and separate groups of students, FICA will seek to help them streamline their projects to address the core concerns of the primary stakeholders in education in India – the teachers, the principal/school, and the parents.
AAA’s Learning and Participation
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organization, initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. In response to the regional lack of resource materials for learning about contemporary art, AAA’s Learning & Participation programme was established in 2009 to offer accessible programmes and learning resources for educators, youth and young adults, and other members of the community—beyond professionals in the field. Along with its collection of materials and through the provision of an alternative, participatory, sustainable and free platform for learning about art alongside the mainstream curriculum, Learning & Participation hopes to redefine the ways audiences might learn about contemporary art in Asia and rethink the role of art in education and society.
Schedule
2:00 – 2:40pm
Vidya/Bhooma – Welcome address (5mins)
Priya Pall – Introduction to AAA India presentation. Introduce Susanna Chung
Guest Speaker – Susanna Chung
2:40 – 3:30pm
Institutions working in Art Education – interventions and innovations
This set session will address how various organisations working with art education have imaged their work impacting the education sector in India, what their reach is, their relationship with mainstream teachers in schools and what innovative methods they are exploring with regard to art education.
3:30 – 3:45
Tea
3:45 – 4:30
What are you teaching when you teach art?
This session will look at how teachers/educators define art education, substantiate how art education adds value to a student’s overall development, and how they plan their lessons including methods, resources they use and how they document and evaluate their teaching.
4:30 – 5:15
Teaching beyond Schools
This session will attempt to examine methods and devices employed by educators and institutions to engage with a general audience which don’t necessarily need to be school students and/or art audience. How does art engage with a larger public and address the question of culture and identity.
