Goals of the Chair

The UNESCO Chair in Arts and Learning promotes the priorities of UNESCO in relation to fostering mutual understanding and interaction, building capacity, intersectorality, fostering a culture of peace, respect for cultural diversity, arts education and creativity.  With this focus, the Chair aims to foster interdisciplinary, inter-university sharing as well as north-south and north-south-south transferring of knowledge in a spirit of solidarity, through democratic collaboration, teacher education, research and e-learning.

The goals of the Chair are consistent with UNESCO’s Medium-Term Strategy for the period 2008-2013 which states (Pg. 27, Para. 97):
UNESCO will also promote the potential of dialogue based on music and the arts as a vector for the strengthening of mutual understanding and interaction as well as for building a culture of peace and respect for cultural diversity. UNESCO will follow up in an intersectoral manner the Lisbon Roadmap adopted at the 2006 Lisbon Conference on Arts and Education and contribute to the 2009 Seoul Conference on Arts Education. 

Development Objective (long term)
The long-term objective of the Chair is to build capacity in teacher education and quality of education through collaboration on projects, events and electronic sharing of knowledge in arts and learning with a view to promoting north-south and north-south-south dialogue, mutual understanding and a culture of peace.

Specific Objectives (short term)
• Advance the principal of quality education for all by developing an e-course for teachers of drama/theatre with international content, arrived at through democratic North-South-South dialogue.
• Build capacity for teachers in arts education research through democratic collaboration on research that will generate a mutual understanding of creativity in arts education that is informed by an international (north-south) perspective
• Build on the achievements of the first UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education (Lisbon, March, 2006) and of the second UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education (Seoul, 2010) by continuing a dialogue on issues that emerged at the first conference as recorded in the UNESCO Roadmap for Arts and Education and the plans that were developed at the second conference as articulated in The Seoul Agenda: Goals for the development of arts education.
• Extend participation in these projects and events for teachers and artists through a universally available, electronic newsletter and an interactive website.
These goals reflect the guidelines of the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chair program while, at the same time, serving to advance larger UNESCO priorities such as fostering literacy, quality education for all and capacity building.