In charge of the International Resource Office, coordinating the Arts Education Hub and the Youth Hub, as well as acting as the Coordination Office’s contact for the Nordic/Baltic members.
Arts educators rarely get the chance to step back, compare notes and rethink their craft together. SPOTing changed that, bringing together arts educators from eight European cultural centres to strengthen the field of arts education across Europe through professional development, knowledge exchange and participatory research.
About the initiative
In 2020, TEH was granted funding through the EU's Erasmus+ programme for Spaces of Transformation in Arts Education (SPOTing). The project ran for three years, from September 2020 to August 2023, and consisted of a consortium of eight TEH members from Sweden, Italy, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Slovakia, France and Austria, with the TEH Coordination Office as lead partner.
SPOTing aimed to strengthen participating arts educators in their profession and support critical reflection on methods and ways of working, developing and strengthening cultural pedagogy as a field internationally. Researcher Sheelagh Colclough facilitated a participatory action-research (PAR) process, following the project partners' progress throughout, with the results presented as case studies, a programme report, and shared through several dissemination events.
Objectives
- Shared and tested innovative approaches to reaching children and young people facing barriers to participating in the arts, whether through disabilities, intercultural or interfaith differences, language barriers, or social or economic issues.
- Acted as a catalyst for cooperation between participating centres, turning knowledge transfer into concrete action.
- Worked closely with a researcher who created case studies and supported the exploration and development of evaluation methods and practices to benefit the wider field of arts education.
Outputs
The project's findings were published in a final report, providing a comprehensive account of the three-year programme, its methodological principles (adapted from participatory action research frameworks), and recommendations on what's needed to sustain this approach, including questions on the ethics, desirability and sustainability of quantitative, output-focused arts and culture funding.
Legacy
SPOTing's activities were carried out under the umbrella of TEH's Arts Education Hub (established in 2017 as part of the Factories of Imagination project). Since the project's conclusion, the Hub's ongoing work has been coordinated by A4 in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Partners
A consortium of eight TEH members from Sweden, Italy, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Slovakia, France and Austria, led by the TEH Coordination Office: Trans Europe Halles, Brunnenpassage, Röda Sten Konsthall, PPCM, Truc Spherique, Beat Carnival, A4, Associazione Culturale Oltre, Kulturfabrik.
Funders
Contact person