Translated by Louise Pain

I attended my first ever art exhibition while I was still in high school, at the urging of my art teacher at the time. She was also the person who invited me, when I was in Year 7, to join an art club that was run by the local village art association. Every other Saturday, students from different year levels would gather there: young people who wanted to pursue artistic activities outside the home and school environment. And that was precisely what the art club offered us: we were provided with a wide range of materials and given the freedom to use them however we wished. We were prompted to ask ourselves what interested us and why; we were given the opportunity to explore new possibilities and found that we were taken seriously in the process. Regular feedback sessions were also an integral part of the club, where everyone had the chance—or rather, was encouraged—to share their thoughts on their peers’ work. The club and these sessions offered me a truly unique and invaluable space and experience. Without it, there is a high chance I would never have gone on to study art. Now, looking back, I believe that the art club environment enabled me to cultivate a sense of self-efficacy derived from my own interests.

For me, this experience and the memories associated with it remain a tremendous source of motivation and inspiration for my own practice as an art educator today. Obviously, it is impossible to readily replicate an experience like the one I had, and I feel it is important to acknowledge that my ability to access this kind of space was also made possible by my own privilege and good fortune—opportunities that many other children are denied. This awareness is also what motivates me to interrogate how barriers to extracurricular learning spaces might be dismantled, and what potential these alternative spaces for action might hold.

So far, in my own work in the field art education, I have gained a wide range of experiences. I would emphasise at this point that those who practise art education professionally as paid work are required to adapt to the existing structures and framework conditions—even though these may at times conflict with their own personal values or pedagogical approach.

At the same time, the experiences and challenges I have encountered in different contexts have helped me to develop and strengthen my own perspective and approach.

Much of my work in art education has taken place in settings and projects shaped by rigid, predefined structures. For example, participation fees have in many cases further restricted people’s access to extracurricular workshops, where opportunities to take part were often already limited to begin with. Other constraints include strictly prescribed school curricula and course structures, as well as a decidedly results-oriented approach, with expectations placed on me as an educator to deliver specific, tangible outcomes.

In this context, I find myself returning to the question: to what extent is it possible for us to identify and expand spaces for action and possibility within existing structures, even when these conflict with our own values or pedagogical approach? How can we render these structures more flexible? And how might we, at the very least, lower or even remove some of the barriers these structures impose?

At this juncture, I would like to turn to the work of Aladin El-Mafaalani, who, in his book Mythos Bildung: Die ungerechte Gesellschaft, ihr Bildungssystem und seine Zukunft (The Myth of Education: Why Education is Always Good, but Never the Solution), talks about the need for a framework of support that takes societal inequalities of opportunity and resources into account. El-Mafaalani argues that an ‘inequality-conscious’ approach is essential if we are to meaningfully counteract the unequal starting opportunities faced by socially disadvantaged people. This means ‘compensating for deficits, […] fostering the talents inherent in every child, and promoting exceptional achievement’ (El-Mafaalani, 2021, p. 12). He emphasises that these efforts must focus in particular on ‘children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and those experiencing challenging life circumstances’ (El-Mafaalani, 2021, p. 12) in order to systematically address unequal opportunities.

‘Where unequal circumstances are dealt with in the same way, we only end up reinforcing and reproducing inequality. What an inequality-conscious education framework should actually entail is that it takes a tailored and targeted approach to mitigating unequal circumstances’ (El-Mafaalani, 2021, p. 12).

When forced to operate within preexisting structures and frameworks, it can seem virtually impossible for educators to break down the barriers that prevent certain children from accessing these spaces in the first place. Integrating extracurricular educational programmes into the regular school day could create opportunities for a more comprehensive, inequality-conscious, and emancipatory approach. Yet even within established and more exclusive settings, there are certain approaches and methods that can be applied in order to open up room for action, thereby enabling educators to deconstruct the barriers embedded in rigid systems with a greater awareness of systems and effects of inequality. Betina Aumair explores what these kinds of approaches might look like and the potential they possess in her essay ‘Bildung und soziale Ungleichheit: Impulse für eine klassismuskritische außerschulische Bildungsarbeit’ (Education and Social Inequality: Inspiration for Anti-Classist Extracurricular Educational Work) published in the book Solidarisch gegen Klassismus (In Solidarity Against Classism), edited by Francis Seeck and Brigitte Theißl.

Aumair identifies two fundamental principles for critical, extracurricular educational work: ‘First, the proposed educational content should directly relate to young people’s actual lived realities. Second, educational processes should empower young people to shape their own lives and the social conditions in which they operate with intention and purpose’ (Aumair, 2023, p. 225). This requires an understanding of education ‘that does not primarily focus on boosting performance in the sense of the capitalist valorisation of people and knowledge, but instead positions human emancipation and the potential to change the world at its centre’ (Aumair, 2023, p. 225). One way to put these principles into practice is to take ‘each learner’s individual frame of reference […] as the starting point from which to develop their learning environment’ (Aumair, 2023, p. 224). What this means in concrete terms is asking learners what they know, what they can do, what interests them, what they would like to learn, what they enjoy doing, and what makes up the fabric of their world (Aumair, 2023, p. 224). Taking the needs and interests of young people seriously is a crucial step toward achieving an anti-classist approach to education (Aumair, 2023, p. 228). For many children and young people—particularly those from less privileged households—being taken seriously is by no means a given. Experiencing this—perhaps for the very first time—can represent a new and important step toward fostering a sense of self-efficacy and a capacity for agency (Aumair, 2023, p. 228). In this regard, Aumair advocates the principle of ‘prioritising the learner over the subject matter’ (2023, p. 224). This mean not only preparing learning content with the individual learner in mind, but also remaining attentive throughout the teaching process to the learners’ interests and experiences—in other words, their lived realities and the worlds they inhabit—and adapting learning environments where necessary. As part of an emancipatory and critical educational practice, the aim should be to encourage active engagement with the world—a process also described as Weltaneignung or ‘appropriating the world’. Weltaneignung refers to the ability to explore and make sense of the world in a self-determined way, as well as to understand how this process can occur (Aumair, 2023, p. 224). In this context, Aumair emphasises that ‘education […] is never separate from its social context; it is always embedded within it’ (Aumair, 2023, p. 224).

Since the focus here is primarily on barriers that arise as a result of social inequalities, it is important to emphasise that mechanisms of discrimination must always be understood through an intersectional lens. This means, for example, that classism is not a separate, self-contained category, but is intertwined with other forms of discrimination, including racism, sexism, and ableism. The interaction of multiple forms of discrimination, in turn, engenders distinct forms and effects of marginalisation.

For educational work to be genuinely emancipatory, an inequality-conscious approach must necessarily be intersectional, acknowledging and taking into account the effects of multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination.

In the context of art education, I would like to explore two different ways of understanding art education practice. The first understands art education as the sharing of artistic methods, skills, abilities, possibilities, and strategies. The primary focus here is on the artistic process itself: opening up options, valuing ideas, and helping them to take shape. In my experience, however, just as much valuable exchange can occur in the interstitial spaces that arise during a collaborative creative process. These moments might involve sharing experiences, memories, associations, doubts, wishes, and interests. Just how much space is carved out for these kinds of exchanges depends largely on the approach and attitude of the educator. Collective reflection can also constitute a valuable part of this practice, encouraging learners in their own creative work and helping them to navigate and hopefully overcome their doubts.

A second understanding of art education sees art as an alternative tool for producing and disseminating knowledge. Artistic and art-educational methods can be employed in an effort to make educational content more accessible: for example, by offering a variety of points of connection and associations that appeal to the different lived realities of the people doing the learning. This can open up non-linear exchanges around a topic, guided by the learners’ own interests and allowing them to explore how the subject matter might relate to their own individual lives.

These kinds of approaches to art education can help us to perceive of educational processes as non-linear and, by putting the learners at the centre, make these processes more empowering and emancipatory. In my opinion, it is both sensible and necessary to bolster the connection between an intersectional awareness of inequality and the practice of art education—particularly with respect to the mindset and approach of the teachers themselves. I consider an individual’s capacity to consistently reflect on their own positionality to be an indispensable element of any inequality-conscious educational work. This entails that person developing an awareness of their own privileges and experiences of marginalisation, as well as recognising the influence and authority they bring into a space as an educator.

It is therefore essential that educators be given opportunities to further their knowledge of intersectional mechanisms of discrimination and inequality-conscious educational practice, ideally as part of their paid working hours.

Working collectively also makes a great deal of sense from an emancipatory perspective, with collective working processes allowing for an increased diversity of perspectives and exchange from the outset, even in the planning stage. Collective work also necessarily entails a shared process of engagement and reflection, which I consider essential to an inequality-conscious practice. Other forms of collective feedback and reflection could provide opportunities for art educators to share knowledge, experiences, tools, challenges, and (self-)critique. A network, for instance, could facilitate collective learning and create a reciprocal process of exchange.

There is no single, definitive answer to what an intersectional, inequality-conscious approach to art education should look like in concrete terms. Nonetheless, there are certain preexisting approaches and initiatives that can help broaden opportunities for participation and foster emancipatory outcomes.

One example is a project by the ‘trafo.K’ collective—an office for art education and critical knowledge production—which demonstrates how art can be used as a resource or tool for acquiring knowledge with a view to communicating intersectional content. The collective’s ‘FlicFlac’ workshop materials—developed by the collective through a participatory process accompanied by research in the field of social science—comprise queer-feminist resources for vocational schools. During these workshop sessions, participants are presented with artworks in postcard format, and each person selects a card, which then serves as a prompt for further discussion. Simon Nagy, a member of trafo.K, explained in an interview that the collective—guided by a clear, emancipatory commitment—works exclusively with counter-images and contradictory imagery, and eschews materials that reproduce forms of discrimination. According to Nagy, this points to a particular potential inherent in artistic works: ‘the ability to create contradictory images that invite disagreement and conflict, while also allowing different forms of expert knowledge to be rapidly disseminated among learners’ (Bramkamp 2026). In this context, art can be understood as a medium that is at once contradictory and also capable of generating contradictions, and to which each individual brings a unique form of expertise that their peers may not possess. These different forms of knowledge can generate productive conflict, in which the traditional role and authority of the teacher are challenged and ultimately give way to a more equal exchange within the group. For Nagy, this dynamic remains a fundamental objective of education practice (Bramkamp, 2026).

In July 2024, I co-facilitated one of four weeks of the ‘Freiraum für Gedanken und Bauwerke’ (Open Space for Thoughts and Buildings) at the Kunstverein Langenhagen—a free, open-access summer programme for local children and young people. Those of us responsible for facilitating the programme and events were encouraged to see ourselves first and foremost as ‘assistants’ who would work on equal footing with the participants, responding to their ideas and group dynamics rather than preparing specific project concepts in advance. The intention was to embark on an open-ended process together, as a collective. The programme attracted a large number of children from the surrounding neighbourhood. As a facilitator, I entered the week with probably just as much uncertainty as the participants themselves. The ‘open space’ aimed to foster an anti-hierarchical approach, but existing hierarchies were not being explicitly addressed or negotiated. We were encouraged to engage with the children in a supportive, assistant-like capacity, but there was no clear discussion of what our roles as assistants actually entailed, or how those role might inform our interactions with participants. How we responded to chaotic or overwhelming situations, for example, depended largely on the individual facilitator. While this open framework offered considerable scope for action, it became abundantly clear to me in moments of conflict that an anti-hierarchical approach must actively address and negotiate existing hierarchies and power relations if it is to be genuinely effective in its aims. When it comes to interactions between facilitators and participants, these intersectional hierarchies and power relations can be influenced by factors such as age, habitus, language, race, and gender.

There is no singular blueprint for what an intersectional, inequality-conscious art education practice should look like. Intersectional effects are complex and multidimensional, as are the potential approaches for addressing, discussing, and deconstructing them. The specific structural conditions within which educators operate also play an important role in this regard. Nonetheless, previous projects and existing methods can offer inspiration for creating scope and expanding possibilities for action. They can help increase the likelihood that learners will connect with particular content or experiences and develop a sense of self-efficacy or empowerment. For me, this also forms part of a broader intersectional struggle.

References

Aumair, B. (2023) ‘Bildung und soziale Ungleichheit: Impulse für eine klassismuskritische außerschulische Bildungsarbeit’, in Seeck, F. and Theißl, B. (eds.), Solidarisch gegen Klassismus, pp. 222–232, 4th edition. Münster: UNRAST-Verlag.

Bramkamp, L. (2026) Interview with Simon Nagy, 10 March 2026. Unpublished.

El-Mafaalani, A. (2021) Mythos Bildung: Die ungerechte Gesellschaft, ihr Bildungssystem und seine Zukunft, 1st edition. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.