IDEA and UNESCO
Cultivating International Collaborations in Arts Education
Towards Strengthening International Cooperation in Arts Education.
Dan Baron Cohen l President of International Drama/Theatre Education Association
UNESCO Asia-Pacific Regional Conference in Preparation for the ‘World
Conference on Arts Education’
Seoul, Korea l November 23-25, 2005
Wanai sa yomo ledit bejo
Una mama, weno bejo
Wanai sa yomo ledit bejo
I will speak to you today using certain ‘artistic’ languages (song, story-telling and photography), not simply to celebrate the expressive and reflective languages of my own and our shared creative humanity, but to stimulate our responsive intelligences. Though this is primarily a conference for sharing ideas and shaping policy, I want to try to use simple pedagogical proposals which transform social spaces – be they conferences, classrooms, galleries or theatres – into dialogic stages, both to affirm our need to be empathetic, reflective, active, dialogic and cooperative, in order to be human, and to ‘touch’ your humanities and the intimate spaces between you. How else can we be motivating and effective?
You have this paper in translation. I will now turn to use a prepared structure and at times, open spaces for ‘dialogic murmuring’, for you to share your impressions and ideas with the person beside you, and to relax your concentrated focus into a more interactive reflection. I hope this will also enable you to focus your own ideas and be good preparation for our later discussions.
When I first received the invitation to speak to the theme of ‘Strengthening International Cooperation in Arts Education’, I considered passing it to one of IDEA’s well-travelled more academic elected officers. There are many who could have effectively presented the histories of the international conferences, joint-publications, and political advocacy that have contributed to international cooperation for arts education.
But as I began to reflect on this key theme as a poet, sculptor and playwright of some 25 years experience in community-based arts education, university-based theatre education, and the ‘formation’ of educators, leaders and community organisers through pedagogies of cooperative learning and social transformation, I thought it would be more appropriate to share my present reflections on the challenges IDEA is facing today. For we are attempting to develop and transform how we operate interculturally and cooperate internationally to become effective advocates of arts education, not simply as an optional discipline, but as an essential pedagogy for the 21st Century. I have distilled this decision in my simple alteration of the proposed title that I received from UNESCO, into: cultivating international collaborations in arts education. This deliberately focuses our proposal: that the fulfilment of this clearly-shared conference aim and policy objective depends upon appropriate cultural processes and pedagogical methods. It could be put another way:
I sing my daughter to touch the memory in your skin
I sing my son to reveal the history in your bones
I sing my world to illuminate the imagined paths of our future
In other words: how do we motivate children, teenagers, parents, teachers, headteachers and their elected political representatives to believe that their knowledge, imagination and cooperation are relevant resources to personal, community and planetary transformation?
For us in IDEA, this question frames our response to the context in which we are working. Today, the life- and environment-threatening effects of market-driven educational policies and of ‘pedagogies of rationalised conflict’ (whose origins lie in the colonial needs of a now-remote industrial age), are intimately felt and debated in homes, community associations and staff-rooms throughout the world. (An entire wing has just been added to a major hospital in Sao Paulo for depressed and terrified teachers who can no longer cope with their pupils’ violent reactions to the tension and fragmentation inside their homes and communities, or with the militarisation of their schools and the intensifying competition within their universities). These should be fertile conditions for nurturing personal motivation and international cooperation to construct alternative pedagogies that can enable us to survive, to creatively adapt to the socio-cultural and economic effects of our today’s accelerated technological change, and to nurture social relations based on cooperative decision-making, solidarity, social care and participatory democracy.
However, in my experience of schools, universities, community associations, social movements and professional networks, the more dominant responses are quite the opposite. Educators throughout the world speak of an increase in pragmatic individualism, sometimes resigned and often aggressive, and a retreat from any kind of organised networking or cooperative action. Both may be read as part of a contemporary ‘structure of feeling’, continuously valued, stimulated and reinforced by the culture of consumerism through the extended reach of the micro-technology at its disposal. Despite all the voices and images of hope around us, this era seems to be characterised more by fear and silence, than shared confidence and debate. Listen to the voice of a fourteen year old from post-industrial England who today is father to a fourteen year old of the post-modern world:
You know I never learned how to hate
Until I walked through that school gate
To mention the tension you feel
Is it all based upon fear
Playgrounds make the sounds of silence so clear
Instant silence authority’s near
Teacher, he’s walking and talking so tall
Push the pupil, make him feel small
We arts educators and advisors may passionately believe that human beings are essentially dialogic, theatrical and creative by ‘nature’. We may be convinced that the demystification of the Arts and their redefinition as our expressive and reflective human languages of self-knowledge, empathetic solidarity and identity-formation are essential to the valuing of all our intelligences, the full development of our capacities, and the formation of cooperative communities. But we are advocating in a ‘mediatized’, post-totalitarian and untrusting era, characterised by self-protection, pessimism, isolation, and indifference towards collective needs and cooperative action. Both may be glamorized as ‘post-modern scepticism’. But both contribute to the present banalization and privatization of what some call our ‘life-drama’: the engagement with profound ethical choices that the world confronts us with, choices that shape our identity, give meaning to our lives, and offer the experience of proudly participating in the shared creation of culture. It is precisely this banalization that results from and restimulates the unsatisfying consumption of manufactured identities and cultures. Of course, we need to remember that paradoxically, the obesity that arises from this cannabalising culture may be both self-destructive and the necessary intimate stimulus to building a more socially aware, new cooperative culture. But we need to understand this era clearly if we want to intervene within it effectively.
This is the broad international socio-cultural (and psycho-emotional) context for IDEA’s present strategic response, mediated by a sensitivity to the specific socio-economic realities of each region and the increasingly dangerous widening socio-economic inequalities within each country and city. Over the past six years, I have listened to the proposals from our elected officers and members as they have developed into two inseparable strategic priorities: to transform IDEA into a project-centred world forum, consultancy, and advocate; and to refine and achieve our pedagogical aims through sustainable, intercultural, and relevant collaborative processes. Both are now based on two methodological imperatives: to twin our members from the rich regions with members from the endebted regions, and to use forms and methods of organisation and action – the aesthetics and very subjectivities of our politics – that are consistent with the humanising, formative and transformative aims and claims of arts education.
I want to offer very practical details about this strategic response so that we can think beyond rhetoric.
In terms of our culture of communication, particularly email-communication, we are doing all that we can to develop intimate, personalised and precise forms of address that begin from where our reader-members are, and offer solidarity and space for open creative responses. Increasingly, we will only use collective emailing as a ‘stage of public affirmation’. We are finding that personalised, specific e-dialogue is much more effective than generalised mailouts, and that images (including of course, ‘sensuous’ and poetic language) are more effective than paragraphs, as the mind is both more stimulated by the image, does not read linearly, and as such is much more visually literate. We are, in other words, trying to use the new technologies of communication intimately and dialogically (rather than ideologically), to touch the humanity and motivating needs of our members.
We are trying to use this dialogic culture of communication to implement our most significant methodological shift: to make collaborative projects the activating principle of cultivating dialogue and cooperation between members. Our four categories of project priorities are important (healing and solidarity, intercultural international youth workshops/performances, celebration and exchange, interactive website provision), as is the gradual sequence of moving from a local, intra-community level to an international or inter-regional level of collaboration. But much more important is that all these projects encourage the movement of drama-educators and young people between communities, to take part in in-school and out-of-school residencies which generate not only self-confidence, solidarity, aesthetic and artistic educations, but also the motivated participation of parents, teachers and politicians. This human contact, both through visiting and receiving other communities, cultivates networks and the cooperation between networks, and provides a humanising dimension to lives that experience fragmentation, communicide and isolation.
Of course, the fact that the questions that guide these collaborations also begin and arise from the experience and needs of the participants makes good pedagogical sense in terms of motivating and sustaining these collaborations. But to see international cooperation in terms of a dialogue between the specific concerns of local communities is fundamental to cultivating its dynamism and sustainability. This would not be radical or innovative news for any effective arts-educator, creative dialogic teacher, or exceptional political campaigner. But it is still very innovative in terms of conceiving and building international networks and cooperation. Once again, it is grounded in the importance of intimacy and dialogue.
These intra-community and intercultural collaborations are focused through the principle of ‘twinning’, the commitment to building dialogues, friendships and intercultural solidarity between unequal worlds. It is certainly significant that this has an appealing and powerful ethical foundation and often implicit commitment to equality or justice. But this organising and very practical principle is essential to the human circulation of pedagogies and teaching resources, and to the dialogic cultivation of mutual understanding, respect and friendship. Both are essential to sustainable and sustained international cooperation, and the mobilizing of entire communities around pedagogical proposals and policy. It is our intention to transform these collaborations into not just networks of international and regional exchanges, but into regional institutes for research into new arts-based pedagogies and the formation of new generations of interculturally literate and skilled arts-educators.
Based upon these same pedagogical principles of collaboration and rooted in the living experiences and needs of our members, IDEA is dedicated to building not just these regional networks and institutes, but to collaborating with InSEA (the International Society for Education through the Arts), ISME (the International Society for Musical Education), UNESCO and other international bodies to create an integrated global resource of pedagogical action (consultancy, training, placements, information-exchange), and sustainable advocacy at every level. Placed in the hands of those who ache for solidarity and cooperation, to transform their homes, classrooms, streets and communities into living dramas of self-confident participation and creative cooperation (rather than apathy, passivity and conflict-survival), such a resource will grow and mature very quickly. But it will only grow and remain vital and transformative if it is rooted in a living cultural pedagogy of dialogue and collaboration.
This is the exceptional importance of this UNESCO intervention, and the epic but intimate challenge that we face as art-educators and advocates, preparing the paths of our future.