IFACCA’s Latin American coordinator, Santiago Jara, has recently participated in the steering committee organising Arteducacion09, a conference held in Bogotá, Colombia, designed to prepare recommendations to be presented at the UNESCO’s World Conference on Arts and Education in Seoul, Korea, in May 2010.
Arteducacion09, the Latin American and Caribbean Summit for Arts Education, was organised by Ámbar Cultural Corporation for Arts, Culture and Arts Education Research and Development, in agreement with the World Alliance for Arts Education (WAAE). The WAAE has also organized regional summits in Johannesburg, Vancouver, Seoul and Newcastle, as strategic spaces to prepare similar declarations and recommendations for UNESCO’s World Conference in Seoul.
The Summit consisted of panel sessions followed by discussion, workshops, colloquiums and a conference by Lee Dae Young, President of the Korea Arts and Culture Education Service, on new media arts. Subjects dealt with in the panel sessions were trends, indicators and impact of the arts in education, UNESCO’s Road Map on Arts Education developments in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the role of arts education in meeting the millennium objectives.
The colloquia were designed to propose policy guidelines and actions in the areas of arts education-cultural diversity; education-communication-culture and arts education; education-communication-culture and creative and critical thinking; arts education and heritage, craftwork, creative industries, museums and media; follow up and evaluation of arts education processes and indicators and information systems specialized in arts education, and others that the participants proposed based on their speciality. Each colloquium had a virtual forum that can be accessed at the Pre Summit Area of the Summit’s Website (www.arteducacion.org).
IFACCA, through its Latin American Coordinator, was part of the Summit’s steering committee and contributed to defining the selection criteria of invitees from civil society, other than the WAAE delegates and special guests. Some of the criteria established, in joint collaboration with the other members of the steering committee, were ‘making visible the invisible’ and ‘alternativity’, according to which cultural diversity coalitions of the region, networks like the Brazilian Network of Arts Educators and the Latin American and European Network of Cultural Centres, federations like the Ibero-American Federation of Image and Sound Schools (FEISAL) and the Latin American Forum of Musical Education (FLADEM) were invited, among others.
Thirty-eight civil society representatives from 11 countries met in the civil society colloquium and produced a final document that will be published shortly in www.arteducacion.org and in www.culturaperu.org. Culturaperu.org also published a progress report of the civil society colloquium in Spanish.
Thanks to IFACCA, Octaedro Publishers were part of the arts and education fair. The Spanish version of The Wow Factor by Prof Anne Bamford was promoted and sold to the participants.
ConnectCP Iberoamericano was also promoted, especially amongst delegates from Education and Culture Ministries attending and the Latin American delegates and special guests of the World Alliance for Arts Education (WAAE).