Arts Education is a new field of knowledge that emerges from the scientific research within the fields of Art and Sciences of Education, and it cannot be confined to a merely cumulative logic. With the realization of the International Encounter on Arts Education, we intend to discuss new directions for this area, contributing to its setting in terms of epistemological, theoretical and practical perspectives. The significance of this Encounter responds, both, to the urgency and importance of this debate and to the possibility it offers, from an international and multicultural perspective, to promote a discussion clarifying the specific nature of knowledge and research in arts education. The initial discussion of this field in Cape Verde, benefits from the experience of M_EIA (MINDELO_International Art School), which works as a central facilitator for the participation of people from different geographical, linguistic and cultural areas.

The meeting of experts, researchers, post-graduate students, representatives of governmental and non governmental organizations and other interested persons will provide a diversity of perspectives that will enrich the discussions. We want to foster an environment to hear, see, feel, question, act, experience, not as an arena for sterile speeches, but as a workshop, a place of an implicated reflection for all the participants involved in Art Education. With this Encounter we will seek to establish a space / time for a process: heterogeneous, incomplete, made of reflections on the practices and crossing of ideas among the different participants. We privilege the singularities and contexts, which give meaning to knowledge and experiences, and we aim to build knowledge.

The International Encounter on Arts Education will be in Mindelo, Cape Verde, from 30th August to 4th September 2010, from an impulse born in MA in Visual Arts Education in the third Cycle of the Basic and Secondary Education - running at the University of Oporto, through the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and the Faculty of Fine Arts - and in close collaboration with the M_EIA (MINDELO_ International Art School).