Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Figure 3.2.4 Source of the iniative for cooperation The major nationally supported arts and cultural institutions tended to have programmes of outreach to children. But these were generally supply (rather than demand) driven. These were generally (with the a few noteworthy exceptions) under resourced and not adequately extending their influence beyond the capital city. Similarly, only two of the organisations that participated in the focus group had young people as part of their board or as a consultative group responsible for planning programmes for young people. Passionate individuals have actively promoted partnership work in some instances as the following example shows: Vigdís Jakobsdóttir manages the education department of the National Theatre. The education department of the Theatre was my idea – started 2002. The idea is to link the Theatre in an actual way to teachers and schools. The cultural fund of Glitnir [one of the three large Icelandic banks that now has collapsed] gave 10 millions ISK to start the education dept. which was enough to pay my salary and to put up the web site which is much used by teachers. We prepare brochure and materials for teachers. For the last three years we have toured upper secondary schools around the country. We had a three year support contract with Vodafone; we're two years into the contract and unsure about renewal. On these tours we travel together in a truck and stage the play in school buildings (preferably) but sometimes in the local hall. Ideally we make room for the students to engage in discussions with the actors. Sometimes the parents can come too. This is a challenge and great fun. Every second year all schools should get our visit – the schools in Reykjavík more frequently. For this we have one million ISK annually, which is just about enough to pay for the tour. It is very important to do this for free [not to charge admission]. Schools expressed the opinion that the needs of education were not being “taken seriously” within cultural organisations, as the following quote suggests: “I don’t think they take education seriously. We need to build relationships between cultural providers and schools, not just 10 minute talks about the show.” 56
In the survey, dance schools reported that 100% of their partnership work had to be planned and implemented by them (meaning that other groups had little or no say in the development and applicability of programmes). Such results could also indicate that in an area such as dance the expertise within compulsory schools is low and they are ‘happy’ to let the cultural partner ‘do’ the organisation. Many respondents from the educational and cultural sectors spoke about the need for more partnership working, as the following comments suggest: Artists and teachers should work more closely in schools. Artists could work today to integrate the arts, to make the whole curriculum more creative. I have seen wonders when you get artists and teachers working together. Something like Creative Partnerships would be good here. The schools could take a lead on pulling artists in. Instead of schools just buying shows, you could really open up ideas. Open possibilities to work together. I think we need greater connection between things. The local theatre should work with the school. We have a youth centre on site and that works really well. We have good cooperation. It is best if schools have a flexible structure. The criticism was also made that there was a lack of interdisciplinary partnerships and that the various levels of education rarely collaborated, as the following comment from a university academic stresses: There is a lack of political judgement. We do not clearly define cultural and we don’t define creativity. There is considerable political pressure exerted by the various arts disciplines especially music and visual arts. If you look towards what happens in Finland, especially in the elementary school, there is an overriding view of the importance of culture and creativity in education. We need to establish a dialogue between the education and the arts sector. We have tried to make contacts, but this is not easy. We are doing better in theatre than the other areas. We need partnerships between higher education and schools; between the creative industries and higher education and schools; we need partnerships between the universities and the arts academies; we need partnerships between professional artists and teachers. We need more creative research and interdisciplinary projects. The tension between teaching students and arts students: There is a perception that if you do art education as opposed to an arts degree you are not going to be a real teacher nor are you going to be a real artist. School principals think the arts are nice but not necessary. School leaders need to have guidance in how to make the arts flourish. Arts teachers become isolated. They might be the only arts teacher in the school. The specialist teachers get pushed into a corner. Conversely, where partnerships did occur between different disciplines the results described were very positive, as the following example shows; “We operate closely together across different departments of the arts. We are also closely linked to the professional and professional bodies. We work closely with the major cultural organisations. We conduct joint research projects.” Museums and cultural institutions (such as theatres, galleries, community spaces) in Iceland generally receive subsidies from the national and/or local and/or regional government. There is considerable expertise within these museums and they make a number of outreach programmes to both schools and the broader community. They rarely conduct teacher development activities or provide introduction and enrichment orientations for teachers. Similarly, there is the impression that the role of developing learning resources has actually decreased over recent years. While the museums offer a number of services to assist arts and cultural education, these are largely under resourced and under utilized. From the perspective of the museum, often large education programmes are run by a small staff receiving only a fraction of the global budget of 57
Page 1 and 2:
Arts and Cultural Education in Icel
Page 3 and 4:
Acknowledgements This research woul
Page 5 and 6: Helga Rut Guðmundsdóttir Helgi Vi
Page 7 and 8: 5.4.2 Talent developement..........
Page 9 and 10: practices, but in reality there are
Page 11 and 12: Chapter 1: Introduction and overvie
Page 13 and 14: school type to which the comment re
Page 15 and 16: A future study could examine specif
Page 17 and 18: The number of pupils with a foreign
Page 19 and 20: pre-primary school teachers were so
Page 21 and 22: Figure 1.5.3: How useful is the Nat
Page 23 and 24: The conclusions from this report in
Page 25 and 26: primary level exceptional students
Page 27 and 28: ‣ Schools and colleges should be
Page 29 and 30: Increasingly, schools are becoming
Page 31 and 32: here, it is a good cooperation. We
Page 33 and 34: In terms of suggested improvements
Page 35 and 36: There are 300 hundred pupils in thi
Page 37 and 38: Figure 1.12.2 Accessibility of the
Page 39 and 40: e active in a range of local profes
Page 41 and 42: schools have waiting lists of child
Page 43 and 44: Going to local schools… well we t
Page 45 and 46: in theatre. The students really lov
Page 47 and 48: We had a great show. The teachers d
Page 49 and 50: lot of satisfaction out of the proc
Page 51 and 52: Chapter 2 World Benchmarking 2.1 In
Page 53 and 54: Chapter 3: Responses to quality 3.1
Page 55: Figure 3.2.1 Compulsory school coll
Page 59 and 60: The school is participating in the
Page 61 and 62: visitors. The diverse and ‘quirky
Page 63 and 64: A smaller group of girls performs a
Page 65 and 66: Figure 3.3.6 Pupil performances in
Page 67 and 68: way the children’s artworks were
Page 69 and 70: has always been and it is 20 or 30
Page 71 and 72: ‣ Funding should encourage risk t
Page 73 and 74: music sector could be less constrai
Page 75 and 76: Conversely, the accessibility of ou
Page 77 and 78: Vignette 3.7.4 Every day there are
Page 79 and 80: Despite the geographical challenges
Page 81 and 82: In visual arts we mainly assess acc
Page 83 and 84: We try to do professional developme
Page 85 and 86: This vignette from an academic in t
Page 87 and 88: in offering adult education. Other
Page 89 and 90: demanding more of our schools and t
Page 91 and 92: It was argued that the arts may not
Page 93 and 94: (teacher a professional photographe
Page 95 and 96: There is a lot of respect amongst p
Page 97 and 98: “The popularity of pop music is g
Page 99 and 100: Others would argue that the connect
Page 101 and 102: interrelationship with nature and c
Page 103 and 104: From this summary, it can be seen t
Page 105 and 106: training of senior secondary arts t
Page 107 and 108:
Vignette 5.2.4 Our selection proces
Page 109 and 110:
There is a lack of connection betwe
Page 111 and 112:
During the research, various school
Page 113 and 114:
The following sections are other as
Page 115 and 116:
For older pupils, there are electiv
Page 117 and 118:
Before I came here no-one was doing
Page 119 and 120:
Creative and cultural industries Mo
Page 121 and 122:
While the previously listed recomme
show all

Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?