Global perspectives in Art Education based on examples from West Africa

This manual is based on a fundamental human experience, the encounter with something unfamiliar that has been made by other people. Unfamiliar things that cannot be classified, not understood, that cannot (at first) be dealt with in a meaningful way because they elude familiar and traditional categories. This experience is irritating, but it can also arouse curiosity. The frequency of this experience has been steadily increasing since the modern age; a tendency that has accelerated enormously with globalisation and continues to do so: Unfamiliar, foreign phenomena are coming closer and closer to people more and more often – e.g. when travelling, not only abroad, in museums and at art exhibitions, in intercultural encounters in the immigration society we live in, as well as in digital communities and transnational work contexts. A future-oriented education system must reflect this life-world experience and it will try to develop strategies to do so. Ultimately, this involves the question of what skills the students who will take on responsibility tomorrow need to deal with this challenge in such a way that it contributes to mutual understanding and constructive dialogue. Art lessons can make an important contribution to this. Art lessons are primarily concerned with visual-aesthetic forms of expression, i.e. something that (in the European tradition) can be called, e.g., art, design, architecture or arts and crafts – in English there is the collective term "visual cultures" for this. However, art - to name just one example – is often not only called something completely different in other regions of the world, most languages do not even have a meaningful equivalent for it (Wagner 2022). Moreover, the phenomena that come close to what is understood by art from a European perspective are usually quite differently embedded socially, politically, culturally or religiously. Works, artefacts, objects, practices that are special in their respective contexts in a particular way are at the centre of the encounter there, which from the European perspective can often only be understood with difficulty at first. This is why art lessons can contribute in an exemplary way to the educational goal of "Global Learning" and this manual is intended as such a contribution. It focuses on the objects. Some of these are also examples of the ongoing debate about the restitution of these objects. Even though this debate is of great political relevance with regard to dealing with the colonial past of the countries of origin, it is only briefly addressed in the articles on the relevant objects in order not to obscure the essential aim of the manual. However, the authors are of course fully aware of the problem.