During the symposium, various speakers illustrated how schools and art practices can intersect, using concrete examples. Additionally, attendees participated in workshops led by students who, under the guidance of Jorge Lucero, executed 'conceptual art interventions' at various schools in the province of North Holland. The symposium 'Teacher as a Conceptual Artist' was hosted by Framer Framed and was part of the UNESCO International Arts Education Week, 21-27 May 2018.

Artist, educator, and researcher Jorge Lucero holds a radical vision: the teaching practice of art educators is also their art practice. Lucero's interdisciplinary art practice is rooted in social arts, using the diversity of the school population as the basis for engaged art production. In this practice, the school functions as a 'studio,' the everyday school environment as 'material,' and students as co-artists. His presentation explored conceptual and concrete approaches to merging school and art practices. View the presentation.

Dr. Jorge Lucero (1976) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned his master's degree and PhD from Pennsylvania State University. He is currently affiliated with the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is recognized as a conceptual artist, a leading art educator, and an active author for various art education journals.

In 2013, Jorge Lucero gave a lecture on 'Teacher as Conceptual Artist' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Listen to the podcast.

As part of the percentage regulation by the municipality of Utrecht, artist Frank Koolen developed Studio Steltman for the Gerrit Rietveld College, a secondary school in Utrecht. This experimental research platform for innovative art education aims to explore new possibilities in the relationship between contemporary visual art and (art) education. Functioning autonomously within the context of the Gerrit Rietveld College, the Studio occupies a unique intermediary position. Through active participation in existing classes, supplementary workshops, or the creation of new in-situ artworks in the school, surprising collaborations with visual artists emerge, creating provocative imagery in the daily school environment and expanding the space for spontaneous actions and the unexpected.

Frank Koolen (1978) is a visual artist, art educator, and head of the Fine Art program at the HKU in Utrecht. He studied at the HKU, De Ateliers, and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work is characterized as an ongoing and context-related search for unexpected logic.

Room 13 is the name of an international network of local initiatives for a radically democratic art practice. In the student-run studios of Room 13, children collaborate with adult artists as equals in an artistic collective. Marike Hoekstra's presentation used the Room 13 practice as a starting point to connect the theoretical frameworks of democratic pedagogy with an artistic investigation into the spatial aspects of democratic art education. View the presentation (ppt)

Marike Hoekstra (1966) is a researcher, educator, and visual artist. She teaches research and art education at the Breitner Academy and the Master of Arts Education program at AHK. Her research publications focus on the artist-teacher (2009, 2010) and altermodern art education (2012). Since 2014, Marike has been working on her PhD research on artist-teachers and democratic pedagogy.