Pamela Lawton, associate professor of art education, will launch her new book Community-Based Art Education Across the Lifespan: Finding Common Ground on July 19. Co-written with Margaret A. Walker and Melissa Green, the book is an introduction to a form of art education that reaches beyond the classroom to foster broader community dialogues, understanding and collaboration.
Lawton spoke about her research in advance of her Tate Exchange partnership this July, saying that her intergenerational project Artstories was an important precedent to the book.
In what I call ‘community based art education,’ it’s about the learning that happens in the process of artmaking. It’s not like a social practice artist who may interact with the community to make their work. The process of making is where leadership development comes from, where self-empowerment comes from.
I’ve posited a theory of age-integrated arts learning. So part of this work [Artstories] continues to inform me as I continue to try to write it up for other people.
You can order or preview the book through Teachers College Press.
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