Fostering social inclusion for all through artistic education: developing support for students with disabilitie

Social inclusion is an unquestionable issue and a challenge that any democratic society faces in order to improve the quality of life of all its citizens. However, the participation of people with disabilities is still scarce. Although art has formed part of some programmes aimed at people with disabilities, it has had a therapeutic or rehabilitative nature. The purpose of guaranteeing basic rights such as education, health or work has relegated the right to cultural participation to a secondary position. Similarly, the fundamentally subject-centred explanatory model of disability has endorsed the consideration of cultural spaces as places for participation only by normative citizens. The INARTdis project aims to bring art and culture closer to students with disabilities to develop participation and social inclusion through spaces of artistic creation.
Firstly, the project will try to detect the training needs and barriers and
opportunities to develop socio-educational processes that favour the social inclusion. Therefore, it will train professionals from educational and cultural institutions in relation to inclusion and artistic education and how it plays an important role in the development of social inclusion processes. The fundamental pillar of the project will be to design, implement and evaluate an inclusive arts education project through the creation of inclusive and creative spaces in museums: “Inclusive and Creative Spaces”. Later, an itinerary exhibition will present the artworks. It will involve professionals from educational and museum staff and students with disabilities from each partner.
During the three years, the outputs, results and products from INARTdis include studies and innovation reports, surveys, access to digital content, tools, training materials, exhibitions, workshops and seminars. The partners consider that the dissemination, impact and exploitation of the project are interdependent and are an end in itself of the proposal presented.