Call to Action on Arts Education

COVID-19 has devastated the arts and learning sector, threatening to push the arts completely out of post-pandemic school programming while limiting the impact of the sector on broader community revival. We are seeking endorsements for our Call to Action on Arts Education to help in our advocacy efforts as we seek to sustain and grow arts and learning in an emerging new normal. By adding your name, you will make a bold statement that arts and creativity are integral to the learning process, both at school and throughout life, and are fundamental to the development of the fully realized individual.

Call to Action on Arts Education - The Winnipeg Vision

The Canadian Network for Arts & Learning calls on governments, artists, educators, professional organizations, researchers, universities, communities, and all advocates of arts and learning to endorse the following principles to ensure that the arts are positioned to make an increased and sustainable contribution to learning both at school and throughout our communities.

The vision is the outcome of a major conference (Creative Convergence) held in Winnipeg, Manitoba in October of 2019 during which participating experts from across Canada and around the globe were asked to share their perspectives on the future of the sector. Their responses highlighted how the three goals of the Seoul Agenda, Goals for the development of arts education (UNESCO 2010) can be interpreted from the perspective of practitioners and learners.

We envision a sustainable future for arts and learning in which learners of all ages:

  1. Have Access

    • Access diverse and inclusive learning experiences in, through and about the arts via
      • Opportunities within the home, community, learning institutions, and workplace
      • Recognition and celebration of diverse artistic traditions and expressions
      • Digitally mediated and face-to-face engagement
      • Overcoming social, economic, geographic, and cultural barriers

  2. Experience Quality

    • Experience quality arts education via
      • Progressive development of artistic knowledge and techniques
      • Self-expression and human interaction
      • Responding to works of arts from diverse cultures and traditions
      • Balancing the potential and risks of technologically-mediated arts practice and learning
      • Moments of contemplation, curiosity, wonder, joy and delight

  3. Apply the Arts

    • Apply the arts to issues of personal, local, and global significance via
      • connecting to self, others and community
      • Building understanding, reconciling difference and mobilizing change
      • Supporting civic engagement and social good
      • Contributing to personal and community health and well being
      • Activating artistic ways of knowing within non-arts sectors

Our call to action is issued in sympathy with the provisions of the Frankfurt Declaration for Arts Education (World Alliance for Arts Education, November 2019) and is closely aligned with several of the goals and targets of UNESCO's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNESCO 2015).

View the Call to Action as a PDF

Add your endorsement to the Call to Action on Arts Education

Recent Endorsements

Justin Odwak

I am endorsing because I am a music teacher and am very nervous for the future of my field.

Kim Stewart

I am endorsing because Art is what makes us human. It is an essential mode of learning, exploration and expression.

Creative Education in Action

I am endorsing because As a teacher, teaching artist of many years, and now a business owner, my mission is to transform classroom practice so students and teachers thrive. The arts are vehicles through which much of the curriculum can be taught including social and emotional learning, which is key to success.

David Stewart

I am endorsing because Over the past 15 years art and music in my local school has been sorely neglected. A well equipped band room remains silent, singing does not happen -Yet every couple of years this school puts on a "Musical" very badly because the students have no skils. There is a person on staff who claims to be |The Fine Arts Coordinator" but little fine art is evident. Attempts to engage the student population in community arts and culture such as free admission to the Kaslo Concert Society presentations falls flat. This situation must change.

Reid Campbell

I am endorsing because I wish all education was treated equally. The arts address so much of the person and their development towards the adult citizen they are to become.