ABSTRACT
In recent years, art education and training in Australia has experienced some seismic shifts due to declining public funding and support for the arts over the past two decades. A resurgence of the maker movement, an international phenomenon applying specific frictions on the way art education is currently conceptualised is also part of this changing landscape. Alongside the maker revival is an increasing interest in entrepreneurship and innovation, and the rise of ‘startup’ culture. As background to these manifestations is a growing move towards and desire by the public to be part of various communities of practice in creative, art making fields. This cocktail of ingredients has coalesced to offer new ways of thinking about and experiencing art education and poses questions regarding the ways it will be conceptualised in the future. This chapter explores the topic of art education in Australia to argue that for the broader public, art education is currently closely connected to notions of making, identity, wellbeing, community, and even entrepreneurship. This poses particular challenges to the ways in which the majority of Australian art education have been framed and offered in recent times. An increasing interest in small-scale, flexible, community, and maker-based, short course art education places pressures on formal educational institutions as they are often unable to develop and offer courses within such parameters. As such, a niche has opened for different ways of experiencing art education, one that challenges much of the thinking established during the late 20th century. Interrogating this opening, this chapter offers insights into the future of art education within a new ecology of, and desire for, making.
