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Viewing sustainability as a process rather than a goal places artists, designers and art educators in a key position to contribute to sustainability. Following Anthony Giddens’s theories of structuration and socialization, we can see that established values, world-views, structures, rules and norms influence human behaviour. However, as individuals begin to recognize the potential of reflexivity and ask themselves how change is possible, they learn to modify their behaviour. Art education needs to promote reflexivity in order to contribute to a sustainable process of change. Artistic practices and art education stress the value of shaping the self and our relations with others, and can lead learners to transcend common boundaries through creative thinking and imagining alternative realities. Partnerships forged by art educators amongst themselves and with other stakeholders can create new spaces of experience and empower individuals to achieve change. This Special Issue explores how art educators, activists and artists engage with processes of educational, cultural and political change and embrace sustainability inside and outside school.

Review of: Joseph Beuys and the Artistic Education: Theory and Practice of an Artistic Art Education, Carl-Peter Buschkühle (2020) Leiden: Brill/Sense, 238 pp., ISBN 978-90-04-42454-8, p/back, €50.00

Contemporary artists are increasingly engaging in curatorial work and strategies while curators interpret the exhibition as an artistic medium in its own right. The teaching of art in schools and art education programmes in universities, however, does not often integrate curating as an activity or field of study within more conventional studio classes or methodologies for teaching and learning art. After briefly outlining a history of key artist-curators, this article suggests that curating – particularly its collaborative, social qualities – can enrich art pedagogies and curricula, and proposes four curatorial processes that could positively expand the remit of art education. These processes are understood as integral aspects of art-making and focus on the development of a pedagogy of dialogue, creating dialogues between different artworks and objects, dialogues between curatorial positions, dialogues between works of art and various publics, and finally, facilitating the etymological notion of ‘care’ within the art class.

Review of: Art as Unlearning: Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy, John Baldacchino (2019)London and New York: Routledge, 166 pp.,ISBN 978-1-13831-871-7, h/bk, £120.00