Goals of the Chair

Development Objective (long term)

The long-term objective of the Chair is to build capacity in teacher education and quality of education through collaboration on projects, events and electronic sharing of knowledge in arts and learning with a view to promoting north-south and north-south-south dialogue, mutual understanding and a culture of peace.

Specific Objectives (short term)

• Advance the principal of quality education for all by promoting arts as a means of engaging learners and achieving personal and academic learning goals.
• Build capacity for teachers in arts education through democratic collaboration on research that will generate a mutual understanding of creativity in arts education that is informed by an international (north-south) perspective
• Promote and monitor implementation of The Seoul Agenda: Goals for the development of arts education.
• Extend participation in projects and events for teachers and artists through its website and electronic bulletins.

Rationale
There is mounting evidence of the value of the arts in education, both as an intrinsic component of human culture that deserves formal recognition and as an instrument for achieving a range of essential learning goals.  A young person who is exposed to the arts at school, through a professional arts organization or in a community cultural program has an enhanced potential to become a more creative, imaginative, empathetic, expressive, confidant, self-reliant and critically thinking human being.

UNESCO has recognized the potential of Arts Education and Creativity to enhance social cohesion and to promote a culture of peace.  In 1999, the Director General of UNESCO stated,

“At a time when family and social structures are changing, with often adverse effects on children and adolescents, the school of the 21st Century must be able to anticipate the new needs by according a special place to the teaching of artistic values and subjects in order to encourage creativity, which is a distinctive attribute of the human species.  Creativity is our hope.”

Since then, UNESCO has promoted this compelling vision through the Roadmap for Arts Education (2006) and the Seoul Agenda: Goals for the development of arts education (2010)