Transnationally or globally disseminated concepts - and political agendas that respond to these concepts - exist in the realm of cultural education. The OECD, for instance, assumes an important role in the debates around creativity and the discussion around transfer effects - and it sustains this role through excellent research programs [1]. UNESCO in turn founded two NGOs (in music and art education) after World War II and thus brought into being two political actors that assume importance in civil society. Recently, UNESCO also positioned itself with respect to its agenda. Two documents were produced at recent UNESCO World Conferences: “The first of these is the Road Map for Arts Education. This paper was written during and following the 1st UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education, held in Lisbon, Portugal in 2006 on a theme of Building Creative Capacities for the 21st Century. The second is the Seoul Agenda: Goals for the development of arts education. The Seoul Agenda was a major outcome of the 2nd UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education, held in Seoul, the Republic of Korea, in 2010” [2, p.17].

UNESCO has also enabled international research that explores cultural education in a global context while pursuing a comparative approach. Here Anne Bamford's research in preparation for the 2006 conference in Lisbon [3] and the efforts of the International Network for Research in Arts Education (INREA) to develop an international monitoring come to mind [4]. Recently, also a new approach has been published which for the first time seeks to create a dialogue between diverse traditions of cultural education in Africa (Kenya), South America (Colombia), Asia (Taiwan), Oceania (New Zealand), and Europe (Germany). This dialogue accentuates diversity, but also seeks for commonalities [5, p 79].

After a first inspection of global and regional discourses, we can, for the moment, identify five basic approaches, paradigms, or objectives [6, p 41]:

1. The art specific approach

2. The economic approach

3. The social approach

4. The educational approach

5. The political approach

The art specific approach attempts to shape artistic skills for their own sake. Students learn to play an instrument, to sing, to take pictures, to draw, to dance, to act in a proper way (using quality standards - related to a canon of traditional or to experimental, open forms). This concept aims at professional or ambitious levels of skills.

The economic approach has potential (national) economic profits in view. The main motivation behind this approach is to increase creativity by means of arts education, to live up to global challenges or to compete with other nations, in respect to the creative industries as well as generally.

The social approach stresses questions of social integration and prevention. Here arts education is seen as a social therapeutic means with high potential. Care is an important buzzword in this context.

The educational approach focuses on the educational processes in regard to the intrinsic value of the arts. The term “Bildung” is often used for education in this sense. “Bildung” aims at the development of one's personality, at self-formation and the enrichment of one's biography through the experience of arts - in productive and receptive processes alike [7, p. 19].

The political approach aims at disseminating social values. The scope ranges from attempts to motivate participation in global citizenship to a return to regional cultural identities (as in the case of Heritage Education) and to nationalist or patriotic approaches.

In actual practice, these five dimensions or approaches overlap and manifest themselves as idiosyncratic mixtures. In practice, the individual dimensions assume diversely proportioned importance. This way, diverse profiles for specific measures/projects and courses of action can be drawn.

Fig. Profile formation for different projects in the five dimensions, e. g. according to expert evaluation

Such a differentiation according to diverse dimensions provides a first framework for describing the aims or (intended) results that become palpable in local arts education practices. It is a descriptive model, which seeks to approach existing diversity through diverse profiles. The concept can be applied to different players, for instance with respect to diverging historical developments.

Fig. Profile formation for two fictive actors in five dimensions, one in its history

Irrespective of such a differentiation according to dimensions and their proportion in specific local practices, we can trace general global paradigms as well as paradigm-changes in education that do not only concern the field of arts education. Modifications in formal and institutional education took place in the 1960s and again at the turn of the millennium - in the first case due to the influence of new curricula theories and in the second case due to the emergence of a new orientation along competence concepts. These amendments correlate with megatrends in the global thinking on education. The shifts are propelled by social interests and therefore often highly controversial. The orientation along competence concepts - particularly if regarded on the foil of PISA [8] - reflects a change from “material" to a more “formal" education, a replacement of knowledge by skills, of contents by competencies [9]. Along with this shift, cultural education in many countries has been increasingly defined in terms of skill (as observable performance that can help in evaluating the outcome of educational investments) [10, p 89].

Local narratives and international discourse

That the specific contents on the basis of which skills are acquired are not given much attention is consistent with this shift. Contents are however an important factor for sharpening the diverse regional profiles as described above. In this framework, it appears productive to return to this perspective and to explore the diverse narratives mediated by cultural education, to understand them as narratives that are determined by specific contents.

By way of introduction, consider this anecdote: at an INREA Research Symposium on cultural education and education for peace (held in Hong Kong, May 2014), Shizuo Nakazawa, a Japanese scholar working at Nara University of Education, presented an astonishing paper. He retold the story of the 1300-year-old “Great Buddha of Todaji”, a narrative of repeated destruction by war but also a narrative about the struggle of individual monks to rebuild the statue - in spite of all opposition. These monks pursued the aim of keeping the edict by Emperor Shomu that accompanied the first construction of the statue alive. In this edict, the Emperor had described his dream of a world “where all animals and plants shall flourish”. The 1300-year-old vision of the Emperor until today remains the force and inspiration for reconstructing and maintaining the statue. According to Shizuo Nakazawa's interpretation, the Emperor's edict aims at “appreciating the natural environment and establishing a culture of peace" [11]. For him, the story is an apt example for a principle of “sustainability" that orients itself along values and that is asserted by peaceful means against the mainstream.

A comparable narrative is presented by Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker, in his film The Salt of the Earth (2014), which recounts the story of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado [12]. The structural commonalities are startling: Salgado, due to his work as a photographer, often visited locations of catastrophe. His photographs inform our imagination of the famine in the Sahel Zone; of the oil fires in Iraq; of the situation of refugees and war victims. Wender's film revisits the mental breakdown Salgado experienced after he took pictures of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and conveys how his desperation lead to the inability to continue his work as a photographer. In this situation, Salgado initiated a project of reforestation of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest on his father's farm. More than 2 million trees were planted. The film also reports that this “work with nature” healed Salgado and enabled him to complete his last great photographic project, Genesis - a homage to the “Creation”, to the planet Earth [13].

Perhaps these “stories” tell us tales which cross cultural borders and respond to universal imaginings. These stories are simple and fabulous, and they circulate around the question how human beings should live. For arts education, they are interesting, because they adopt “art” (here: aesthetic forms and symbolic embodiments of a specific understanding of the world) as a medium for their protagonists. The (aesthetic) sensitivity that is trained through art enables the respective actors to judge the world according to aesthetic and moral ideas. Such stories or legends can form the basis of narratives that are constitutive for cultural education. They project an idea about humanity and its future and about the role of arts in this context.

Here is an example: in Wender's film about Salgado, the photographer talks about photographic portraiture and describes it as a reciprocal process in which the portrayed person gives his or her face to the photographer as a gift. In another scene, he speaks about his pictures of the refugees leaving Rwanda. Initially, his journey led in the opposite direction, as he wanted to reach Rwanda, but then, later on, he moved with them, away from Rwanda. Perspective, here, initially is a question of aesthetics, but it quickly transforms into empathy.

Aesthetic sensitivity does not produce a humanistic attitude but it can support it. Clear water and fresh air are associated with concepts of beauty. The ennoblement of used or broken objects that are artfully repaired stirs similar sentiments. The Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi is a fitting example for such narratives of ennoblement and the way in which they represent a philosophical-aesthetic stance toward the world. [14] The fractures of broken clay vessels are mended with gold, in order to express that damaged objects tell a story and therefore possess a particular beauty. This perceptivity toward the beauty in objects which do not obey our ideals of perfection can engender a positive attitude in other contexts, for instance toward people with a disability or toward those who fail to live 34 up to conventional expectations. Perhaps Wabi Sabi (as a Japanese and therefore culture-specific concept) could serve as a global template for cultural education, as it unites a positive stance toward the environment with a specific idea of beauty.

The repertoire of stories evoked here remains committed to a humanistic stance. Further examples can be added: ranging from Joseph Beuys to Daniel Barenboim. But they only represent one aspect in the diversity of possible contents. Thus they enter into competition with other “stories”, “stories” that transport more problematic values. Examples for formats and spheres that can embody or incorporate the more negatively connoted type of story can be found in propaganda, computer games, advertisement, architecture, academia, and sport events [15]. The stories that are told here transport notions of competition and oppression as means of interaction, establish prejudice as a basis for coexistence. These stories appear - at least on a superficial level - more “attractive" than stories about a regard for human rights and a civilized commitment to peace. It is evident that there are rivaling narrative repertoires which strive to gain a dominant position in the discourses that define our understanding of the world. We are dealing with questions of power: who can decide which stories are encouraged and promoted and which “stories” are suppressed - who determines which “stories” are told and decides by whom and how they are told? Different actors pursue different agendas. The ideas of NGOs differ from those of political parties; rulers cultivate different interests than resistance groups. And the stories of all these are again different from the ones we find in the spheres of economy or of religion. This variety of interests shows that the handling of “stories” is a sensitive task.

For arts education, this means that rather than just telling stories, we also need to reflect their specific function within a network of rivaling interests and their relation to power structures: which narratives are selected by whom? Which narratives and patterns of behavior are used in specific contexts and which ones are not used? Which questions and narrative structures are developed? These questions should - in the spirit of enlightenment - also be applied to one's own “stories”.

art education global concept

An international, comparative, cultural research scheme would constitute a fascinating project: to collect stories from different regions as examples of cultural education, to analyze their structure and their potential; to find out whether specific structures are indeed global and universal and to explore their local permutations in order to understand the impact "localization" has (particularly with respect to the addressee and the situations in which these stories are told) on the stories themselves and on their audience.

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