Conference Agenda

The conditions of musical socialization and subjectivication (Gebhard, 2023) have shifted dramatically in the digital age. According to recent JIM-Study in Germany (“Youth, Information, Media”; MPFS, 2025), listening to music plays a central role for 93% of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19. Especially popular music genres are favored by this age group (MIZ, 2025). Furthermore, students are constantly exposed to commercial mechanisms, influencers, and algorithmic curation through streaming platforms and social media (Hornberger, 2017), popular music and its cultural environments serve as crucial resources for identity formation and social cohesion (Schneider-Binkl, 2025).

However, the educational response to these changing conditions remains inadequate. While popular music in schools is mostly taught in the context of practical musicking, the theoretical and sociological dimensions of everyday environments explored in interdisciplinary Popular Music Studies rarely find their way into the classroom (Buchborn et al., 2021; Terhag, 2010). At the same time, the European Art Music remains the hegemonial basis of the German music education system (Buchborn et al., 2021). Consequently, a gap persists: expansive academic knowledge about popular music cultures (‘knowing’) exists but is seldom translated into lesson content that fosters critical reflection in students (‘acting’). Hence, this study aims to develop didactic design principles for popular music lessons in German secondary schools, to promote a reflexive approach to popular music cultures through the integration of interdisciplinary popular music discourses.

This dissertational research project is thus grounded in the intersection of interdisciplinary Popular Music Studies and Popular Music Education. It posits that (popular) musical practice should be complemented by a reflexive engagement and analysis of its influences on societal developments to foster critical agency. The theoretical framework draws on concepts of cultural capital and identity formation, aiming for an understanding of the mechanisms of the music industry and media representation as a prerequisite for democratic participation in a mediatized society.

Until the late twentieth century, artists and art educators working in the European Arctic were predominantly trained in southern urban centres, where artistic education was grounded in Western art canons and Enlightenment-based epistemologies. As a result, artistic representations of the Arctic and related educational practices were often shaped by an external gaze that positioned the North as peripheral and culturally deficient. While such practices increased visibility and awareness of Arctic regions, they also reinforced colonial power relations and generated tensions between dominant national cultures and regional or Indigenous communities.

Since the 1990s, Arctic art has increasingly been understood as a contemporary and situated field of practice that engages with present-day Arctic realities, ecological systems, and nature–culture relations. This shift aligns with broader decolonial perspectives that critically examine the role of art education in either sustaining or challenging colonial structures.

This poster draws on decolonial theory, eco-cultural perspectives, and the principle of two-eyed seeing to frame Arctic art education as a relational, place-based, and epistemologically plural field. The concept of eco-cultural intra-action is used to emphasise the agency of land, materials, and more-than-human actors in learning processes, challenging human-centred and canon-driven approaches to art education.

In contemporary education systems, the primary objective of vocationally oriented learning is not merely the transmission of theoretical knowledge but the development of learners who are capable of applying their knowledge in real-life and professional contexts [1][5]. This approach is particularly relevant in countries such as Kazakhstan, where the need to strengthen domestic production and prepare a competitive workforce remains a national priority. As the global labor market increasingly values creativity, adaptability, and technical competence, schools are expected to equip students with practical skills that align with future professional demands [5].

One of the significant challenges observed in upper secondary education is students’ limited ability to transform creative ideas into production-ready outcomes. Although learners often demonstrate originality and innovation in project-based tasks, they frequently lack the skills required to prepare the necessary technical and graphic documentation that supports the production process. This issue becomes especially apparent in elective subjects related to design, graphics, and technology, where creativity must be complemented by structured technical knowledge [2].

The updated curriculum in Kazakhstan emphasizes interdisciplinary learning and competency-based education, highlighting the importance of vocational orientation, creativity, and functional literacy [7]. Within this framework, subjects such as “Graphics and Design” play a critical role in developing students’ professional awareness and life skills. However, classroom observations and assessment results indicate that students tend to focus primarily on the aesthetic or conceptual aspects of their projects while neglecting standardization requirements, specification documents, and technical regulations. As a result, their work often remains at the idea stage rather than progressing toward real-world application [4].

This gap between creative thinking and technical execution presents a pedagogical challenge for teachers. In particular, students struggle to understand the role of standardization, unification, and interchangeability in ensuring product quality, safety, and efficiency. According to educational researchers, meaningful learning occurs when students are guided to connect abstract concepts with practical application through structured instructional support [3][10]. These difficulties suggest the need for targeted instructional strategies that integrate creativity with technical competence through differentiated and practice-oriented learning.

Action research provides a suitable framework for addressing such classroom-based challenges, as it allows teachers to systematically investigate their own practice, implement changes, and evaluate their impact on student learning [1][4]. By engaging in collaborative inquiry with colleagues, teachers can identify underlying problems, test innovative teaching approaches, and refine instructional strategies in response to observed outcomes. Moreover, action research supports professional development by fostering reflective practice and evidence-based decision-making [6].

This study was conducted as an action research project in a Grade 11 elective course, “Graphics and Design,” focusing on the topic “Standardization. Products, Parts, and Their Elements.” The research aimed to explore how teaching students to complete technical documentation—such as specification forms—could enhance their vocational knowledge and support the transition from creative ideas to production-oriented outputs. The study also sought to examine the effectiveness of differentiated instruction, role-based group work, and the integration of digital tools, including ChatGPT, in supporting students’ understanding of technical concepts [9].

The central research question guiding this action research was:

How can teaching technical documentation through differentiated and creative instructional strategies improve students’ vocational knowledge and readiness for production-oriented tasks?

By addressing this question, the study contributes to the growing body of research on vocational education, creativity, and technology-enhanced learning. It also offers practical insights for teachers seeking to balance creativity and standardization in design-related subjects, particularly within the context of upper secondary education [5][7].

Today, as we create art together with a nonhuman agent called artificial intelligence, the ontology of art is once again being put into question. At the same time, the superficial and short-lived stimuli offered by a technological condition in which the digital has become fully foregrounded seem, paradoxically, to call for a return to a more classical model of arts education—one that seeks liberation from machines and the recovery of direct contact with (natural) materiality. To explore the possibility of an arts education theory that can traverse—and encompass—these two diagnoses and perspectives that appear to conflict, this study places at its center the Object-Oriented Ontology of the new materialist philosopher Graham Harman (1961–). Harman provides a conceptual framework for understanding artistic practices in the AI era that cannot be captured by the human–world binary, while continuing to insist on art’s distinctiveness and autonomy.

Harman (2020) ultimately argues for the aesthetic autonomy of the compound entity formed by things—including artworks—and their beholders. He overturns a modern worldview in which the world is meaningful because humans perceive it and confer meaning upon it, and he recognizes not only beings beyond the reach of human sensation but also the relations that obtain among those beings. In doing so, he seeks to capture honestly the character of art as a practice of treating the things of the world more justly. From this perspective, Harman’s discussion appears capable of offering a persuasive concept of art and an aesthetic theory through which one can speak of art’s educational significance on the new horizon opened by human–nonhuman relations. This claim seems educationally compelling in two main respects.

First, it concerns the question of how to treat objects more justly. Art and arts education have often been justified as sensuous humanistic education that restores humanity or as civic education that expands social and public values. Yet, despite their differences, these accounts commonly retain an anthropocentric stance toward objects and environments. Does treating things justly, then, mean abandoning the human perspective altogether? That would be nearly impossible. Harman proposes a third approach. By carefully differentiating human modes of relating to objects, he rejects the reduction of things to their components, functions, or effects—as if explanatory knowledge were equivalent to the thing itself. Instead, he emphasizes a cognitive form without knowledge, in which one attempts to feel sensuously the quality of the real object (Real-Object) that cannot be exhausted by conceptual grasp. (Harman, 2020: 28)

Second, Harman rearticulates art’s autonomy by discussing art as ontology beyond the sphere of human action alone. For him, autonomy does not reside in the artwork as an isolated entity; it emerges when artwork and beholder form a hybrid situation. This is a moment of ontological encounter in which an object is neither instrumentalized nor merely represented. It opens not through what is already known or explained about the thing, but through an effort to register its qualitative force directly. Harman describes such moments as experiences of beauty, understood as an explicit tension between a withdrawn real object and its vivid sensuous qualities. (Harman, 2020: 22, 97)

Finally, this study takes the Teshima Art Museum in Japan as a case that exemplifies aesthetic autonomy as a human–object compound. Analyzing this experience from Harman’s ontology of art, the study clarifies the educational meaning of (1) form that exceeds human subjectivity and (2) the importance of fragmentary depth against digitally accelerated perception. In doing so, it aims to articulate arts education not only as a modern pedagogical contribution but also as an ontological practice of forming a more just relationship with things.

This proposal presents part of an ongoing doctoral research project in the field of Arts Education, that explores walking-with as an artistic and methodological approach to learning, researching and thinking collectively. In this context, walking is understood as a condition through which attention, knowledge and relationships are produced.

Developed in educational and urban contexts - between school, street, and museum - the research is based on the assumption that learning is not only cognitive or discursive, but also embodied, situated, and relational. Walking practices create conditions for slowing down, sharing rhythms, and cultivating forms of attention that challenge accelerated and results-oriented models of education. In this framework, learning is understood as something that develops through presence, care and correspondence with others and with the place.

The central theme of this research is the articulation between movement, attention and learning in arts education. Walking is approached as an artistic and pedagogical practice that allows research to emerge with participants, rather than being conducted on them. This approach brings collective experience, uncertainty and openness to the fore, privileging processes over results.

The study is guided by the following main questions:

• How can walking practices generate shared spaces of attention and learning in arts education?

• What kinds of knowledge emerge when learning is approached as an embodied and collective process?

• How can writing and drawing function as methodological gestures that extend walking, rather than merely documenting it?

Conceptually, the research is informed by perspectives that challenge representational and extractive models of knowledge. The notion of walking-with emphasises learning as a relational process, produced through the correspondence between bodies, places, and situations. Attention is understood not as an individual cognitive ability, but as a shared and cultivated practice that develops over time.

Writing and drawing play a central role in this context - they are approached as embodied practices that allow lived experience to continue in another form. Writing and drawing, and their lines, are understood as gestures, marks that translate movement, allowing thought to happen through the body.

The aim of this research is not to produce generalisable results or fixed models, but to articulate a practice-based methodological approach. By focusing on how learning and research occur, the study aims to contribute to discussions in arts education, research-creation and embodied pedagogy, offering walking-with as a method that privileges slowness, relationality and collective attention.