| [28|07|2004] Art and Education were some of the themes of the WCF
Aiming at sharing the French experience in the área of education, within a classical educational system, the debate “Artists and Education” was promoted with the mediation of Jean Michel Djian and participation of the cultural engineer Claude Mollard. We also had the participation of the journalist Pascale Lismonde from “France Culture” radio station and Marcelle Bonjour, who has been working with education and dance for children and teenagers - Danse au Coeur.- for the last 20 years. The speakers shared their point of view on topics such as how to move people emotionally ,artistic interventions, development of a critical atitude, artistic practises at schools and artistic education for teachers.
Mr. Mollard, ex-aid of minister Jack Lang, reported briefly on the development of the French education system concluding that there was a great lack of investiment in artistic education. In 1880, when public schools were established, there were intentions to include arts in the school programme but teachers decided to give more emphasis to arts historic background- having more theory and literary studies instead of practises. During the Fine Arts period, the Education Ministry discarded arts from its term and created new forms of education related to art. Primary school sutents had one hour of plastic arts and one hour of music and secondary school students had none.Then, regional initiatives started to emerge.
According to Mollard, the great change happened in 1990/1992, when Jack Lang (Minister for Education and Culture at the time) brought actions of both Ministries closer.
“Currently, we have reached this stage through joint actions, from local colletive support and help and the recognition of artists as educators. It was a copernic revolution ”, he reported . “There was no other way than to incorporate the artists as well as the librarians, curators etc into the classroom, however teachers were afraid they woul lose their jobs”.
Claude, a cultural enginer reported that in France 12 million sutudents go to school,half of them have artistic education in primary school and in secondary school, 6 million students have an hour of music classes and one hour of plastic arts classes. According to him, new processes are being incorporated in order to promote discoveries and creativity.
One can also notice a positive evolution with regards to teachers education. There´s a programme called PNR (National Centre of resources) for teachers where they work with artists preparing methodologies, exchanging intervention pedagogical techniques. “We need those bonds”, he explanied.
Shortly after that Marcelle, national education teacher and responsible for dance programmes in schools for children, teenagers and amateur adults said : D ance is body and body is culture . “One of the first espressions we learn is related to our bodies”. The teacher believes that, above all, artistic language must come before artistic obligation, by discussing themes such as philosophy and ethics .Then, sensibility is naturally incorporated as well as aesthetics, time and space values, vocabulary and composition. She compared brazilian capoeira to French dance since such language is naturally part of the Brazilan people . In France, Marcelle works with 400 dance groups. “Experimentation must be encouraged and come before literal knowledge levels”, she finished.
Pascale, journalist of a public radio station presents a programme about artistic education called. The Art of School , created in 2003 after reserach carried out about arts in schools. She was a teacher and used to coordinate her teaching methods by associating drawings history, music and paintings.
“At that time, twenty years ago, teachers were very reluctant about this coordinated methodology. Now, we´ve been working with this new idea for four years and it has become possible. After a lot of research in specific areas, the government launched an art integration programme in schools all over the country . As a result we could see that students who found it difficult to adapt to the classical system, got completely involved with arts”.
She gave an example of a school in the country. Most of its students were imigrants who spoke very little French and therefore suffered prejudice. These students had a three hour class per week with musicians and the children learned French very quickly. “The contact with a different art sector gave outstanding results . A group of students from 7 to 9 learned filming techniques, cuts, edition, photography, focosing etc and ended up winning a prize and going to Paris to show their film. Such relationship develops the critical atitude of those students also with regards to TV. These practises makes them eager to learn”, she concluded.
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