Culture Agents for Creative Schools
Cultural education uses the medium of the arts to prepare young people for the future. Stiftung Mercator is committed to ensuring that all children and young people have access to art and culture and to making cultural education an integral part of the school curriculum. If quality cultural education is to be achieved, schools must be willing to cooperate with cultural institutions. To this end, the project will send “Culture Agents” to schools where they will collaborate with pupils, teachers, principals, artists and cultural institutions in creating a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary cultural education programme and establishing long-term cooperative ventures between schools and cultural institutions. The programme will commence in the 2011/2012 school year 138 schools in Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Hamburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia.
Structure and organization
A large number of children and young people can be reached by going directly to schools. The programme can only be sustainable if it inspires schools and the cultural institutions with which they cooperate and encourages them to develop joint cultural programmes of their own. The programme’s facilitators at these institutions – teachers, artists, cultural professionals – must recognize the necessity of ensuring the quality of the artistic projects and creating the necessary structures for them.
The central partners of the programme are the cultural institutions and the artists associated with them. The audiences of tomorrow are in schools today and that is where museums, concert halls, libraries, theatres and cultural centres will go to reach them. The goal is to jointly search for new ways and possibilities for schools and their cultural partners to promote mutual accessibility and develop model cooperative projects.
The model programme will commence in the 2011/2012 school year with a total of 46 agents at schools in Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Hamburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia. As each agent will supervise a local network of up to three schools, it is possible that 138 schools could participate in the programme. The application process for culture agents is expected to begin in April 2011. All the participating states have pledged to co-finance the model programme and are closely involved in its implementation.
Schools in the states mentioned above may apply for participation from spring 2011. The schools will be selected in close consultation with the responsible ministries. The participating schools will be asked to cooperate with artists and non-academic partners and develop a cultural profile together with an external culture agent. The schools should develop artistic projects in collaboration with regional cultural institutions and artists. They may also apply for “Kunstgeld” (art funding) to finance their implementation.
Objectives
It is important that children have the opportunity to actively participate in art and culture. To do this, we must create an environment conducive to art where children can learn to appreciate it and engage in it themselves. The programme “Culture Agents for Creative Schools” wants to stimulate children’s natural curiosity about art, teach them more about art and culture, help form and strengthen their personality and perhaps give them the opportunity to become future protagonists in a culturally-minded society. This can only be achieved if children are allowed to encounter, experience and thoughtfully engage in art and culture.
The “Culture Agents for Creative Schools” programme is aimed at children and young people who have previously had only limited access to art and culture. Its goal is to foster the personal development of as many of them as possible by giving them a lasting enthusiasm for art and culture.