Description: This book offers global perspectives on art education as a distinctive practice that emerges from community relationships.
Invoking transversality as a theoretical framework and a methodological structure, the fifty-five contributors to this volume--community professionals, scholars, artists, educators, and activists from sixteen countries--offer studies and practical examples that explore the complexities of community arts education at all levels. These complexities include challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples; immigration; the growing recognition of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace; among other challenges. The book's chapters fall under four themes--connections, practices, spaces, and relations--that map these and other intersecting assemblages of transversality. Thinking transversally about community art education shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life. This framework also redefines art education as a distinctive practice emerging from the intricate ties that form a community.Brief description: Rita L. Irwin is a distinguished university scholar and professor of art education at the University of British Columbia.