Arts Education Conference:Contexts, Concepts and Practices in Schools

December 11 & 12, 2009, The Chancery Pavilion, Bangalore

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA)
Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore

One of the most important triggers for this conference was the passage through Indian parliament of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill in August 2009. In passing the Bill, the Indian government has expressed a commitment to guaranteeing education for all. However, while the Right to Education might guarantee a right to schooling, there remains the larger issue of the right to a quality education.

The conference was also aimed at showcasing and extending IFA’s ‘Kali-Kalisu’ initiative. Kali-Kalisu is a series of Goethe-Institut-supported arts pedagogy training workshops which have brought arts education to over 500 teachers in rural and small-town Karnataka. Some of these teachers were present at the conference.

Speakers at the conference included administrators such as Chiranjiv Singh, who has been India’s ambassador to the UNESCO; teachers such as Mallesha M Pavagada, who works in a government school in Karnataka’s Dharwad district; theorists such as social scientist and philosopher of science, Prof Shiv Visvanathan; artists such as Jayachandran Palazhy, artistic director of the movement arts centre Attakkalari; students such as Shanthi Carolynn Joseph, who studies in the 8th standard student at an alternative school in Bangalore; and resource persons such as Dr Zakiya Kurrien, Co-Director of the Centre for Learning Resources, which seeks to enrich early education for disadvantaged children.

Speakers approached the subject of arts education from three broad perspectives—that of the theorist and policy-maker; that of the teacher or resource person whose focus is pedagogy; and that of the artist seeking to make an intervention in the world of education. These were not mutually exclusive perspectives, however, as the artists at the conference were sometimes also teachers in both the formal and non-formal senses, while teachers not only discussed classroom experiences but also the philosophical and conceptual basis for arts education.

Theorists and policy-makers emphasised the importance of developing an understanding of arts education suited to a multilingual, culturally diverse and fragmented society such as ours.

Teachers spoke about the enabling potential of the arts and the possibilities for creativity, freedom and originality that the arts create in the classroom.

Artists demonstrated the connections between the arts and fields such as ecology, spoke about education as a continuum rather than a syllabi-bound practice, and sought to extend the idea of arts education beyond specific classroom practices to an enlightened attitude to life.

The aims of the conference were best summed up in the words of Mallesha M Pavagada who said, “A school without the arts is like a place without water.”