Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

What new education places and approaches may arts education propose today by investing in the encounter between Museum and School? What new poetics and worlds are built in the deepening of this relationship? How do we turn it into a common ground? What paradigm shifts operate? In this paper, we share some recent participatory and arts education projects with schools, from the education department of the Modern Art Centre, of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, that create a new relationship between the museum and the school by bringing an arts approach to the classroom to discuss human rights, citizenship and democratic practice. They propose new educational approaches and transformations in the daily and regular educational space - asking, listening, proposing and adapting according to the characteristics and needs of schools, classes, teachers and students - presenting curricular alternatives without intending to be prescriptive, based on different strategies, based on artistic practices and centered on art as a unifying experience from which knowledge can be generated on any topic. Working on values such as empathy, inclusion, equity, democracy and social justice, in a shared ground between museum and school with art as a thinking language trying and exploring new possible ways - paths and places, for arts education in the contemporary world.