Community Arts Education

This book offers global perspectives on art education as a distinctive practice that emerges from community relationships.

Invoking transversality as a theoretical framework and a methodological structure, the fifty-five contributors to this volume—community professionals, scholars, artists, educators, and activists from sixteen countries—offer studies and practical examples that explore the complexities of community arts education at all levels. These complexities include challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples; immigration; the growing recognition of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace; among other challenges.

The book’s chapters fall under four themes—connections, practices, spaces, and relations—that map these and other intersecting assemblages of transversality. Thinking transversally about community art education shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life. This framework also redefines art education as a distinctive practice emerging from the intricate ties that form a community.

Ching-Chiu Lin is assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. 

Anita Sinner is professor of art education at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She works extensively with stories as pedagogic pivots, with emphasis on creative geographies in education.

Rita L. Irwin is a distinguished university scholar and professor of art education at the University of British Columbia.