THE KUMASI SYMPOSIUM: Tapping Local Resources for Sustainable Education Through Art
Department of General Arts & Art Education, College of Arts and Social Sciences
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana
July 31-August 14, 2009

A call is made for contributions addressing one or more of the symposium strands and topics: Art Education Practice, Studio Practice, Curatorial/Museum/Community Arts Practice, Art History/Criticism, Arts Administration/Management/Marketing Practice, and Open Session. The symposium entails plenary sessions and support activities such as demonstrations/workshops, exhibitions, and site-specific tours of local national resources. Expression of interest and proposals for Plenary Sessions and Exhibitions/Practical Workshops will be reviews until January 17, 2009. We expect about 200 participants from around the world. The working language of the conference will be English. Applications for individual paper presentation and participation will be reviewed until the space is filled. All abstracts and brief biographies should be submitted electronically to africoae@gmail.com

The symposium is organized as collaboration between African Community of Arts Educators (AfriCOAE) and KNUST’s Department of General Arts & Art Education. As a follow-up to AfriCOAE’s 2008 “Project Earth to Art: Tapping Local Natural Resources for Sustainable Art Education Development” at Accra. The two-week symposium (July 31-August 14, 2009) will deal with the issue of sustainability in the 21st century to enable visual arts education developments in Ghana and perhaps similar settings. Owing to the challenges of transition from the postcolonial stance and to many others, best practices and resourceful programs often fail to roll out nationwide and to be sustained. The following questions will therefore guide the dialogues: Is sustainability of art teaching and learning developments in the postcolonial African environment possible? Can the postcolonial Ghanaian environment and non-Western others today provide adapt resources for sustainable artistic practice? If so, how can the resources best be tapped for education through art in Anglophone Ghana and other Modernist African settings?

Additional information will also be on the project web site: http://afropoets.tripod.com/eta, the university web site: www.knust.edu.gh and elsewhere on the WWW space.