Educating for Socially Engaged Art in Irish Higher Education

The study concerns higher education for socially engaged art (SEA), focusing on one MA programme in the Republic of Ireland. The research examines the historical context from which SEA higher education in Ireland emerged, how pedagogical practices for SEA are being shaped in this particular programme and the pedagogical, political and aesthetic issues that can arise in the academic setting of higher education with regard to SEA education. Data were collected in ten one-to-one interviews and a group interview, with past and current staff members, between June 2016 and April 2017. Positioned within a qualitative paradigm the data are thematically analysed from a social constructionist methodological perspective, informed by the critical discourse analysis approach of Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier (2016). This methodological approach focuses on the discursive meanings that are mobilised in the data, and are theorised as discourse strands of Place, Practice and Academy. The study provides insights into what is at stake when an art practice with origins in the counter-cultural movement of community arts and the politics of cultural democracy, is formalised within the academic setting of higher education and its art historical traditions. It finds academicisation of SEA practice is connected with community arts historical traditions, but also with avant-garde art historical traditions and their successor practices. Higher education is considered important in instituting SEA into those traditions and legitimising SEA as a valid art practice. Arts-based and pedagogy-based approaches are deemed characteristic of pedagogical practices carried out on the programme. Features of the contemporary higher education landscape, including neo-liberalism, the Bologna Accord, modularisation, theories of human capital, are ascertained to impact on the institutional logics of the programme. Relating to an Irish context, but having resonances beyond Ireland, the study contributes knowledge about SEA higher education, an under-researched area of higher art education in Ireland and elsewhere.