Kazuyo Nakamura

Shifting Grounds: Imagining Global Possibilities for Community Arts Education (Panel)

Kazuyo Nakamura – Hiroshima University, Japan

Chair: Anita Sinner – The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Sophia Chiata – University of the Aegean, Greece

Sue Girak – City Beach Primary School, WA, Australia

Kazuyo Nakamura – Hiroshima University, Japan

Merna Meyer

Patricia Osler – The Convergence Initiative – Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Abstract:

In this multi-paper session, we envision community arts education (CAE) as shifting ground, where discursive changes at the local level informs pedagogy and practice at the intersection of complex and ever-changing global dynamics. We reimagine the role of the arts in community inquiry – a role that is responsive to relations among individuals, communities and the arts – to cultivate more sophisticated understandings of future pathways for community arts education, deliberating on the concept of transversality to signify both an overarching theoretical framework and the methodological structure for reimagining the complexity of community. To move this collective scholarship forward, we make a distinction in philosophy and practice when defining the term community arts education. We purposely favour the term community arts education over community-based arts education. Community arts education implies the necessary equality of education (e.g. pedagogical implementations) and a variety of practices (e.g. programming) for advancing and solidifying relationships between education and community through access to the artistic fields. In this way, we engage with community as not just a place to enact curriculum; it is the curriculum – a practice in which community life, learning and learning activities, and educational aims intersect. We present case studies from Japan, Australia, Canada and Greece that outline challenges ahead and address how thinking transversally is changing our engagement as artists, researchers and teachers. We facilitate greater resilience through multimodal, multifaceted research architectures, produced across three dimensions: horizontal (first person, creative expression); vertical (analytic, sequential problem-solving); and diagonal (traversing digital matrices) to ensure rigour and accountability. In this way, the cartographic potential of community arts education through diverse and socially engaged art, public pedagogy, community engagement, artistic research, and hybridized practices, reflects the growing impact of critical post-humanism, new materialism and worldly education – approaches that reconceptualize community spaces and international educative borders.