Interwoven Tapestries: Lessons from Arts Education
Interwoven Tapestries: Lessons from Arts Education
A two-day national webinar
organised by
India Foundation for the Arts (IFA)
Day 01 | Thursday, March 25, 2021 | 10:30 AM – 04:00 PM
Day 02 | Friday, March 26, 2021 | 11:30 AM – 04:15 PM
Impetus
IFA’s Arts Education programme called Kali Kalisu (meaning ‘learn’ and ‘teach’ in Kannada) is now slowly opening up nationally, after eleven years of training, grantmaking and discourse building across government schools in Karnataka. Furthermore, the external review of this programme which will determine its future is slated for the year 2021-2022. At this moment, it is important for IFA to understand the scope of the programme and what other practitioners in the field are thinking and doing. Therefore, IFA hopes that the conversations and questions raised at Interwoven Tapestries: Lessons from Arts Education will feed into the review process and enrich our knowledge about the existing arts integrated work in education across the country.
Context
Arts education flourishes when there are partnerships between diverse stakeholders including the union and state governments, national and local arts organisations, cultural agencies, community arts practitioners, artists, teachers, museums, and universities. It focuses on meeting the needs of diverse learners. However, shifting mandates and policies have affected its growth, impact and the survival of the arts integration work in government schools in the country. As COVID-19 forced the closure of educational institutions, now the sustainability of arts education itself is under threat.
Objectives
- To explore the various arts pedagogies and processes that are being used by artists and teachers in school education.
- To enquire the ways in which teachers and artists forge synergies between national and local narratives within arts education.
- To understand the roles of private funding and government policies in deciding the philosophy of education, content, and delivery mechanisms that impact arts education.
- To focus especially on the new concerns due to COVID-19 and ways in which educators and artists have been dealing with the situation.
Day 01: Thursday, March 25, 2021
10:30 AM – 10:35 AM: Welcome Address by Arundhati Ghosh, Executive Director, IFA
10:35 AM – 11:15 AM: Keynote Address by Chandrashekhara Kambara, Writer, Researcher, and Nadoja, Padma Shri and Jnanpith awardee
11:15 AM – 11:30 AM: Introduction to the Webinar by Krishna Murthy TN, Programme Officer, Arts Education, IFA
11:30 AM – 01:00 PM: Session 01: Pedagogy and Process: Artists, Teachers, and Schools
Art-integrated learning, as a pedagogic method, is important for enabling the all-round development of children at their formative stages. But this is the age of rapid mediatisation driven by data where gadgets become the windows to the world. In these times, while children are able to access any information at their fingertips instantaneously, they are also increasingly losing ties with their own environments and contexts. This poses challenges to the conventional pedagogic methods of equipping children to reconnect with local communities and nature. In this context, many skills that were associated with classroom learning and examination system, inculcated in conventional pedagogy are now less relevant. This has engendered the importance of imparting skills that were hitherto not emphasised - like emotional intelligence, problem-solving skills, and the ability to work collaboratively. This panel will discuss the ways in which we can leverage the emancipatory potential of arts-integrated learning, to enrich the lives of children.
Moderator:
Blaise Joseph, Artist and Art Educator, Kannur, Kerala
Panellists:
Akshara KV, Theatre Director and Writer, Sri Nilakanteshwara Natya Seva Sangha (Ninasam), Heggodu, Karnataka.
Prema Rangachary, Director, Vidya Vanam, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu
Vidya Shivadas, Director, The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art , New Delhi
02:30 PM – 04:00 PM: Session 02: Local and National: Negotiating Dominant Narratives
There has always been a great disparity between textbook education and the lived realities of students and teachers. Ever since 1986, when Parliament approved the National Policy on Education, the thrust has been to create a ‘national’ system of education. This aspiration usually in the times of ideological nicks and scrapes, incisions and mutilations leads to the excision, exclusion and eventually marginalisation of the local knowledge systems and cultural experiences. The national education system usually makes it imperative for teachers to impart textbook knowledge about unfamiliar events and experiences to students who are equally at sea about them. As a result, the teacher becomes the bridge between the undecipherable textbook and unsuspecting students. This panel will discuss the ways in which teachers negotiate this divide by contextualising the ‘national’ vis-à-vis the ‘local’ in classrooms. It will inquire how arts education enables teachers and students to balance ideas of the national and local and, at times, subvert these as well. It will further unpack how arts education plays a vital role in understanding the varied notions of history, identity, and culture in various sociocultural contexts. It will also look at the diverse articulations of these notions in different language contexts.
Moderator:
Joyoti Roy, Head, Strategy and Marketing at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Panellists:
J Devika, Professor, Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, Kerala
Ravikumar Kashi, Contemporary Artist, Writer, and Teacher, Bangalore, Karnataka
Sohail Hashmi, Freelance writer, Filmmaker, and Heritage Activist, New Delhi
Day 02: Friday, March 26, 2021
11:30 AM – 01:00 PM: Session 03: Funding and Policy: Influencing the Critical Impact
Policies at one end and funding at the other influence the discourse and implementation of art education in educational contexts. While the government has clearly emphasised the significance of the arts in education for many years now, through its different directives and curriculum frameworks, they have not invested the resources or infrastructure for its active implementation in schools. Thus, the schools and educationists still depend on private funding to establish and fund arts education programmes. As key players thus both policy and funding play critical roles in deciding the philosophy, content, delivery mechanisms, and thus impact of arts education. Their ability to take risks, push boundaries or create imaginative initiatives determine the extent to which arts education can enrich the learnings of the students; while any conflicts between government policy and private funding can give rise to confusions and ambiguities within the system. This panel will ponder on some of the useful public private partnership models in arts education.
Moderator:
Sriram V Ayer, Founder and CEO - NalandaWay Foundation, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Panellists:
Asha Mishra, National Vice President, Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, New Delhi
Rajkumar Rajak, Resource Person, Azim Premji Foundation, Tonk, Rajasthan
Ritika Gandhi, Manager, Corporate Social Responsibility, Titan Company Limited, Bangalore, Karnataka
02.30 PM – 04.00 PM: Session 04: COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19: Imagining the New Normal
Will online teaching-learning replace traditional methods in the post-pandemic world? This is a much-debated question these days. Education is an area that has been brutally hit by the pandemic and the resulting lockdown. Countless numbers of learners worldwide have been affected by either irregular classes or none at all. While some schools have transitioned to online delivery of classes in order to avoid disruptions, the digital platform still remains largely an unchartered territory in a country like India, and has, in fact, contributed to a huge divide. Another community that has been hugely impacted is that of teachers/educators who have had to upskill themselves with technology overnight, as also parents, who are now forced to bear substantially increased costs to support their children with electronic devices and internet charges. This panel will attempt to explore some of these anomalies and the shape that education could possibly take in the years to come.
Moderator:
Nandini Manjrekar, Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Panellists:
Akshata Krishnamurthy, Assistant Teacher, Anashi, Karnataka
Manmeet Devagun, Artist and Educator, New Delhi
Sahil Ahuja, Theatre Practitioner, and Filmmaker, Jaipur, Rajasthan
04:00 PM – 04:15 PM: Closing Remarks by Sumana Chandrashekar, Programme Lead, IFA