Subject didactics - teaching - research

The department at the Institute for Art and Education is concerned with processes of learning, mediation, appropriation and co-creation of cultural production. The aim of our work is to cross hierarchies and question boundaries in order to promote cultural production and educational work from diverse forms of knowledge and modes of perception.

Didactics - mediation - research is geared towards the production of knowledge for reflexive, discrimination-critical educational practice: in the context of schools, in museums and art spaces, in cultural and educational institutions or artistic/educational projects. Key elements of this are an intersectional understanding of social difference and inequality, post- and decolonial theories, an understanding of identity and gender based on discourse theory and performativity, a concept of culture shaped by cultural studies, a (social) constructivist approach to learning processes as well as artistic processes and approaches to critical, committed pedagogy.

The department's teaching is based on artistic teacher training studies and is interlinked with research. Methodologically central to this is action and practice research. The aim is to create spaces in which students and actors from school and extracurricular education can research their own mediation practice and thus generate options for dealing with problems as well as make this knowledge production available for the field of work. To this end, we cooperate with institutions and organizations from the educational and cultural sector.

Current focal points in research, development and teaching are: the coloniality of art education/mediation, education in dealing with a globally networked cultural production characterized by entangled relations of inequality and the crisis of planetarily unsustainable lifestyles, as well as the possibilities of artistic forms of mediation for conflictual social spaces of negotiation.