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Tapping Local Natural Resources for Sustainable Art
Education Development
PROJECT EARTH-TO-ART is an experimental eco-pedagogy project for application in art education in the Anglophone, Lusophone
and Francophone African settings. The project addresses problems of shortages of adequately trained school art teachers, costs
and reliance on imported art materials, and collaborations with stakeholders of the public and private schools in creating
desirable human capital for teaching and learning in art. The idea is to bring together a cohort of art educators for a two-week
workshop in Ghana in summer 2008.
The workshop will entail formal discussions and mini-lab tours of regional sites to explore for ecological materials and test
their effectiveness in art making. Upon return to their place of teaching, the participants will work with their students
to likewise explore, identity, collect, and design art materials from the local environment and test them by art making. In
the following year, the cohort will reconvene to share the results of the art laboratory and engaged in papermaking workshop
using local-ecological materials. A driving concept of the project is that art materials come from one's own environment;
we reason that in the traditional African setting, the art materials come from the local environment; tools come from the
community, and conceptual basis from the human condition. The focus is Ghana, in hope that the results would disperse into
other parts of Africa and elsewhere.
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