Have Some Imagination: Towards a manifesto for arts education 7-8 February 2025

As a result of educational policy changes and the impact of austerity on arts spending over recent decades, the delivery of arts education in schools, colleges, and universities has been pitched into an unprecedented crisis. Across different geo-political contexts, a narrowly financialised discourse of the arts has variously come to predominate in public culture, often remaindering arts education as comparatively unworthy of financial investment, its ‘outcomes’ seen as being of lesser value than more easily monetised forms arising from other disciplines.

How else might we assess the value of an arts education? How important, even transformative, are the imaginative, world-making capacities of creative learning for society, the planet, the economy? And how should a changed understanding of what or who we think art education is for affect the way in which it should be delivered?

Have Some Imagination will be a free international conference hosted by the Baltic x Northumbria University Institute in Gateshead/Newcastle UK. It will bring together academics, school teachers, artists, community activists, students, policy makers and leaders of the creative industries to address present-day challenges. Activities will involve talks, workshops, keynote lectures, and a collective envisioning project to strategise for an arts education of tomorrow.

Sessions will include presentations around the following themes:

• Imagining alternative worlds
• Rethinking national curricula
• Arts education: a public good?
• Learning in cultural institutions
• How does an artist learn?
• Experimental cultures: then and now
• Education for the creative industries?
• Arts education for whom?

Further information can be found here