The Public Pedagogies Institute is very excited to announce the publication of a Special Edition of the Journal of Public Pedagogies.
Public Pedagogy in Music Education: Reconfiguring Responsibility in Times of the Great Regression
This edition of the Journal is guest edited by Tuulikki Laes and Heidi Westerlund. Each are esteemed intellectuals in music education and public pedagogy. I want to gratefully acknowledge that the inception of the articles in this edition began life during my time as a visiting scholar funded by the Research Council of Finland.
Tuulikki Laes is a university researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki. She works as a lecturer, public speaker, mentor, and facilitator in various contexts. Tuulikki is an Academy Research Fellow appointed by the Research Council of Finland (2023-2027), leading a project: Performing the Political: Public Pedagogy in Higher Music Education.
Heidi Westerlund is a professor at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, where she is responsible for music education doctoral studies. She has published over 140 articles and book chapters.
The contributors to this special issue are part of the community of researchers, teachers, and students at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland.
The issue is now available be read online on the Journal page.
Karen Charman
Editor, Journal of Public Pedagogies
Extract from the Editorial by the guest editors:
“With this special issue, we wish to highlight the potential of public pedagogy in the music field as perhaps the oldest form of associated behavior in human existence. The authors of this issue address, for example, the pressing issues of sustainable futures, including climate action, resistance to colonial occupation, and girls’ and women’s access to the public sphere, by reflecting on the interruptive potential of public pedagogy in higher music education, school music education, and community-based musical practices. In this context, the call for new configurations of public pedagogy is not limited to informal contexts and practices but also, and quite uniquely, includes educational institutions, through their practices, hierarchies, repertoires, admissions, and events, which are integrally connected to public life.
The contributors to this special issue are part of the community of researchers, teachers, and students at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland. While the topic of public pedagogy has only recently emerged within music education research (see, e.g., Lewis, 2024; Barrett & Westerlund, 2024; Laes et al., 2025; Westerlund et al., 2026), several studies from the past decade resonate with the idea of public pedagogy, shaping a research landscape that manifests critical structural change in music education, particularly at the intersections of democratic education and social activism. The authors of this special issue are undergraduate and postgraduate students and faculty members who all have long-established public professional status, as performing for audiences and building relationships with the public are prominent aspects of professional education, often beginning in childhood.
The articles acknowledge that the publicness of music and music education is indeed taken- for-granted and unarticulated, permeated by the dominant practice where past musical repertoires are taught, practiced, and publicly performed without necessarily rethinking the ‘whats’ and ‘why’s beyond the expected musical quality. “ Tuulikki Laes and Heidi Westerlund.
School of Public Pedagogies — Contexts, Collectives and Action
Wednesdays, 10.00am-12.00pm (AEST) October 14 – November 18, 2026
The Public Pedagogies Institute is inviting submissions to present at our 2026 online seminar series: Contexts, Collectives and Action.
The theme for the series is Collectives, both in practice and through representation. What do collective formations offer the public as a way of organising? What are the elements that make up a collective? What are the challenges in actualising collectives and what are the hopes generated through imaginings?
If you are interested in hosting a session as a part of the School of Public Pedagogies, the seminars will take place online once per week on Wednesdays – beginning Wednesday, October 14 through to Wednesday, November 18. Each session will be two hours with two people taking carriage of an hour each. The time is 10.00am-12.00pm (AEST).
Contributors will also be invited to submit an abstract for a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Public Pedagogies.
We recently invited members of the Public Pedagogies Institute to submit some notes on collectives to stimulate ideas for the upcoming seminar series, which we have provided below.
The term ‘collective’ as an organising principle has a long history. Associated with political groups and informed by ideas of egalitarianism, collectives offer another way of undertaking ‘work’ that is informed by egalitarian principles and enacted in ways that are non-hierarchical. By their nature to be egalitarian and non-hierarchical they must interrogate their own composition to address power dynamics and to establish the terms through which they will work. Democratic imperatives in education (Freire 1971, Dewey 1990) are closely aligned with collectivist modes in that there is an aim on behalf of the educator to bring students together to be active participants in both the school and ultimately in the broader society. They also provide fertile ground for questioning, advocacy and reassessing shared values in perpetuity.
Collective plurality is also a condition for political and philosophical realisations (Arendt 1952). Feminist collectives have formed at different times in history in an ongoing challenge or dismantling of patriarchy to address the needs of women. Worker’s collectives have initiated structures whereby profits are shared that challenge the quintessential concept of self-interest in capitalism. Collectives constitute ways of imagining that move us beyond what we now term as neo-liberalism. Larger ways of organising societies have been illustrated through configurations of collectives whether this be in practice or through representation in film, fiction or theatre such as French film makers of the 1930’s, Socialist Realist writers of the same era alongside the ‘New Theatre’ in Australia. More contemporary iterations are collective arts groups who work to realise projects in public settings as well as collectives that meet together to generate social change.
Some community and participant-led research also values the collective over either the individual or hierarchical structure, bringing the questioning of the political act of the distribution of power into the creative and empowering process. This is often done with the realisation that empowerment is not a gift that can be given by others but is act against oppression and is best facilitated by fostering and seeking out collectives, with shared values and experiences.
The idea of collective, collective action, and collectivity when looked from the perspective of a rebellion against the dominant hegemonic system very often tend to overlook the idea of the hegemonic as also the collectives of the individuals (who represent the same idea). The status quo or the shared, consensus values that inform our everyday lives are themselves governed by a kind of silent collective, There is a need for exploration of the meanings of what the term collective may entail. The idea of the collective and the ones which are rebelled against are not fragmented and are a result and part of the process of the same system. Each individual in a group/collective is a representative of complexities of ideas and a result of the processes exposed to different ideas and situations.
The idea of the circles is the representation of different groups of people working on different ideas as collectives they are also the representations of the different populations having different interests. As a result, each group is a set of different ideas and individuals with different interests and intentions. Hence a collective as not a homogenous group rather a mix of complexities of ideas, interests, connections, situations, geographies, demography, ideologies, and temporality.
Therefore, there is a need to explore the idea of collective from different perspective of being;
1) Positive vs negative: how one defines positive and negative is also as situated in the positionality of the individual, the temporal situation and the larger idea of society in relation of what is excepted, not excepted, ideas of equality, justice, equity and access);
2) Existence of hierarchies: the collective actions as lead by people, individuals, or groups. The constitution of groups as also hegemonic powers and people, and may have hierarchies within a group;
3) Intentional and organic: how different groups are formed: just as a result of being situated in a space or as a result of intentionally working for a cause and taking actions (irrespective of whether people like or dislike, agree with each other on some idea and situation), the idea of people working together as a result of the intentionality of the state or institutions;
4) Ephemeral: the groups may come together and dissolve over time with different reasons;
5) Process (constant change, evolution and connected progression, and circling back to the same idea and not necessarily always in a linear form at times in an entangled and nonlinear form): the ideas of the different groups may evolve, dissolve, and change with time and as result the formation of collectives also lead to further bifurcations, change in groups, and formation of different groups.
There is also the shadow side of “collectivity”. We should bear in mind that as other concepts/terms in social organisation have been abused (such as republic), Collective has been hi-jacked at different times throughout history for different political purposes. This shadow side of collectives also occurs in contemporary times where social movements can be orchestrated or used for destructive purposes. So, values are fundamental to understanding collectivity and collective work in community development. The work cannot be separated from the values. That’s why process is important and why reflection is important. The phenomenon of group think, group bullying, group shaming, group scapegoating are interesting experiences of the dark side of collectivity.
The common environmentalist cliche “Think globally, act locally” also evokes collectives and signals the importance of collective action at local levels. So, there is the possibility of the relevance of collectives to social and other circumstances on the ground.
Lastly collective memory—instances of history that have been memorialised or in more recent times contested. The dismantling of monuments; social history museums and the work of Monument Lab https://monumentlab.com all attest to a reconsideration of collective memorialisation. The most recent special issue of the Journal of Public Pedagogies (no 8 2026) is focussed on the public pedagogical formations of history. One of the prompts for this issue was what pedagogical responsibilities do we as communities have to bring a public into a relationship with the past and what might the public contours of this relationship look like?
The latest edition of the Journal of Public Pedagogies is now available online.
The content of this issue grew out of a seminar series hosted by the Institute in 2025 on the theme Public Pedagogical Formations of History. The focus of the seminar series was on the pedagogical affordances and limitations of the public representations of history.
The new issue features the work of Timothy Martin, Michelle Low-Shamir, Scott Welsh, Yuri Páez, Inés Dussel, Jake Burdick, Mahreen Mamoon, and Ralph McCoy.
Journal of Public Pedagogies, Number 8, 2026, can be accessed here.
Cover image above: Ring of Brogan Stone Circle, Scotland. Photograph, Karen Charman
Featured image below: Las desaparecidas de Juárez (Fuente: Elaboración propia. Función Mujeres de Arena 12-Nov/2021)
Exploring the potential of street art to counter misrepresentations and invisibility of Indigenous women and girls in Canadian mass media Dr Anna Rodrigues
Walking and talking with/in place: Socially engaged public art practices in Aoteara Mikayla Journee
Seminar Week 2 Friday, March 14
An exploratory analysis of Malaysia’s hidden history in the Public Sphere Michelle Low-Shamir, Adam Mathews, Kevin Myers
African Diaspora: Preservation of Culture and Memories, and Identity Projects in Australia Charles Mphande,Magang Reech, Konker Malual
Seminar Week 3 Friday, March 21
Remembering the absent ones, remaking publicness Timothy Martin
The Desirous Public: Public Pedagogy and the Gravity of History Jake Burdick, Mahreen Mamoon, Ralph McCoy
Seminar Week 4 Friday, March 28
The Needle in The Ego Era: A History Scott Welsh
Public pedagogies and the memory of the recent past: Experiences with theatre in Michoacán-Mexico
Yuri Páez, Inés Dussel
Seminar Week 5 Friday, April 4
Pragmatically prisming public pedagogies: how conscious reflæXion can lead to eco-psycho-social justice and enhanced wellbeing (workshop)
The Public Pedagogies Institute invites proposals for a forthcoming seminar series on the PublicPedagogical Formations of Histories.
The field of public pedagogy is still relatively new and emerging but has much to offer in how education is enacted. As a discipline public pedagogy looks to instances of learning and teaching outside of formal educational institutions. This includes but is not limited to spaces recognised as sites of informal learning. However, this does not indicate a binary, but rather porous moments where the contours of history are mitigated by public memorialisation, vigils, or other forms of representations. What are the pedagogical affordances and limitations of these respective representations of histories? Public pedagogy recognises the speaking subject in the instances of those who occupy the public realm and contribute to a public understanding of histories.
This seminar series draws on the field of public pedagogy and the educational affordances in the consideration of public memory and public history. It brings together presentations that examine both the relationship between sites of informal learning and the past, and that examine the histories of learning and teaching outside of formal education institutions.
How might history be informed by a public pedagogical framing?
What are the histories of learning and teaching outside of formal education institutions?
How might approaches to public pedagogies benefit from engagement with the history ofeducation?
How is the past remembered and in what ways is the past carried forward in the public realm?
What pedagogical responsibilities do we as communities have to bring a public into a relationship with the past and what might the public contours of this engagement look like?
This seminar series will be held via zoom and will run on a Friday Australian Eastern Standard time 10.00am—12.00pm beginning the 7th of March and concluding on the 4th of April 2025. If you would like to present as a part of this seminar series, please send a proposal no later than January 31, 2025, to Karen.Charman@vu.edu.au.
Seminar presenters will be invited to submit their paper to be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Public Pedagogies.
Recommended reading in the field of public pedagogy:
Biesta, G 2012, ‘Becoming Public: Public Pedagogy, Citizenship and the Public Sphere.’ Social andCultural Geography, vol 13, no 7, pp. 683-697.
Burdick, J, Sandlin, J and O’Malley 2014, Problematizing Public Pedagogy, Routledge.
Charman, K and Dixon, M 2024, Theorising Public Pedagogy: The Educative Agent in the Public Realm. Routledge.
Charman, K and Dixon, M 2022, Theory and Methods for Public Pedagogy Research, Routledge.
Charman, K, Dixon, M, Bellingham, R Thomas, M and Cooper, J 2017, ‘Educational Consciousness: Breaking Open the Category of Knowledge in Footscray’, Journal of Public Pedagogies, vol 2, pp. 54-63.
Sandlin, JA, Schultz, B and Burdick, J 2010 The Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling. Routledge.
A message from Karen Charman, Public Pedagogies Institute:
I hope this message finds you well. As you may be aware, the Public Pedagogies Institute has been in a bit of a hiatus, however now is the time to move forward and I would like to share with you some of the ideas and developments we have in progress.
The importance of thinking and doing education in settings that are open to generative possibilities can’t be underestimated.
Recently I have been inspired by an international group whose focus is on Human Education in the Third Millennium. To this end the group has written a Global Declaration where they set out what education should be concerned with into the future. If you are interested in learning about the Global Declaration here is the link: Educating Humanity for the Third Millennium
I am part of the steering committee for the work of this group. Next year there will be a conference held on February 13-15 2025 at Azim Premji University (Bangalore, India). Link to conference details
The focus of this conference is how to put this declaration to work. This is a truly international group and as part of this broader network I am involved with a sub section of people who live in the Oceanic region.
I think the Public Pedagogies Institute has a role to play in the work of this group, after all our remit is learning and teaching beyond formal education. The projects of the Institute have been about foregrounding knowledge in all its iterations and I believe we are uniquely placed to think about future possibilities for education.
Having said that, remembering and learning from the past is also important. To this end the Public Pedagogies Institute will be running a weekly seminar series in 2025 framed around the following questions:
How might history be informed by a public pedagogical framing?
What are the histories of learning and teaching outside of formal education institutions?
How might approaches to public pedagogies benefit from engagement with the history of education?
How is the past remembered and in what ways is the past carried forward in the public realm?
What pedagogical responsibilities do we as communities have to bring a public into a relationship with the past and what might the public contours of this engagement look like?
An official call for presentations and dates for the seminar series will be announced soon.
Lastly, in future directions for the Journal of Public Pedagogies, I am looking for people who would be interested in being a part of the editorial committee for the Journal. The intent is to publish an edition next year. So please reach out if you would like to know more: Karen.Charman@vu.edu.au
Thank you for your interest and support for the Institute and I look forward to the work that we as Institute will continue to do.
Dr Karen Charman Founder, Public Pedagogies Institute
Forms for Encounter & Exchange: Artist-led approaches to public pedagogy in the Asia Pacific region, a Special Edition of the Journal of Public Pedagogies
This event is co-hosted by CAST and Public Pedagogies Insitute.
There is a burgeoning field of artist-led pedagogic practices in the Asia Pacific region that employ forms of shared knowledge production in the public realm as a core ethical responsibility of creative and scholarly practice. From community-led archives to public learning, collective studying to public art interventions, and collaborative approaches to art-making — the range of contexts from which these artist-led public pedagogies arise directly influence their form and the way they are encountered. These artist-led forms for encounter and exchange can engage publics by challenging hegemonies, critiquing power, and engaging communities in civil dialogue about urgent local concerns. While the relationship between socially engaged art and public pedagogy is typically positioned through Eurocentric traditions as an extension of avant-garde art movements, community arts, or popular education, we are interested in practices which emerge in culturally attuned ways in their respective geopolitical contexts and value collective approaches over the individualism often imposed by western art education.
This special edition aims to stimulate a dialogue between artists, collectives, researchers and organisers engaged in these practices. Guest co-edited by Ferdiansyah Thajib, Marnie Badham, Gatari Surya Kusuma, Diwas Raja Kc and Kelly Hussey-Smith, the articles in this special edition consider the following questions:
• How and why do artists organise through collective forms of public learning?
• How do these practices activate and nurture solidarity?
• How do artists describe and frame these practices in relation to their contexts?
• How do these practices critique and challenge the institutions of art and education?
• How do these forms for encounter and exchange produce and circulate knowledge?
The journal includes contributions from Paola Balla, Jacina Leong, Jill J Tan, Ambika Joshi & Diwas Raja Kc (Computational Mama); Michelle Aung Thin, David Carlin, Francesca Rendle-Short, Melody Ellis, & Lily Trope; ANGA Art Collective, Khoiril Maqin; Anathapindika Dai & Liza Markus (Fugitive Bakery); Riksa Afiaty in conversation with Moelyono; Amelia Wallin, Joel Stern & Channon Goodwin (Disorganising); Jan Brueggemeier & Neal Haslem
Program
1. Journal introduction and welcome – Ferdi Thajib & Kelly Hussey Smith
2. Dr Paola Balla – Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: a focus on the processes and places of repair. Hosted by Ferdi Thajib
3. Short introductions from authors – Jacina Leong; Jill Tan; Melody Ellis and more TBC. Hosted by Marnie Badham
4. Computational Mama workshop – Ambika Joshi hosted by Diwas Raja Kc
5. Short introductions from authors – Khoiril Maqin; Jan Brueggemeier & Neal Haslem and more TBC. Hosted by Marnie Badham
6. Fugitive Bakery performance – Anathapindika Dai & Liza Markus. Hosted by Gatari Surya Kusuma
7. Closing remarks: Karen Charman
(Featured Image: Coffee and the Makers: one of the tools at the School of Improper Education, 2019, KUNCI, image by Agen OH)
This project is based around drawing together older, longer term residents with younger, newer residents in a local area they share.
Prior to the COVID pandemic, Gallery Sunshine Everywhere acquired funding from Brimbank Council and implemented the project in Sunshine, a suburb in Melbourne’s west. A report is available in the Projects section of www.gallerysunshine.com.
In 2019, Gallery Sunshine Everywhere joined with the Public Pedagogies Institute in a successful grant application to Moonee Valley Council to run a similar program in Flemington.
With the various lockdowns in Melbourne, demolition of the Flemington Community Hub, the proposed location for the project, relocation of the Hub’s activities to other community settings, continuing preferences for online rather than in person activities along with staffing changes and considerable changes to the original plan, the Intergenerational Maps Project faced several false starts. Finally, in late 2022, it was decided to embed the project in the afterschool program conducted at Debney Meadows Primary School by the Edmund Rice Foundation.
Finally, we conducted three sessions with large numbers of children each afternoon, along with the Edmund Rice Foundation mentors who work each week with the children.
Dr Iffat Khatoon welcomed the children to each session and gave them an overview of the project.
On Tuesday afternoon, local historian, Sheila Byatt led a wonderful session, capturing the attention of the Grade 3-4 children with the horseshoes and eucalyptus leaves she brought with her and lots of stories about local birds and more. Visiting artist Rhiannon Thomas then took over with a lively artwork session with students drawing their favourite local buildings.
On Wednesday afternoon, former Flemington PS principal, Rotary member and local identity, Lesley McCarthy spoke with the Grade 5-6 children, outside in the sunshine (competing with the loud building noise adjacent to the school). Together they looked at photographs of buildings and important past local events Lesley showed and which were displayed along the school walls. These told stories of old buildings, early images of familiar roads and more. Subsequently, Rhiannon Thomas led the students in an art session and they produced work to be added to the work from the other two days to form a collage documenting the Intergenerational Maps Project.
On Thursday afternoon, I shared stories from “The Stopover that stayed” by Grant Aldous with the young children, had them guess what the handmade nails I showed them were, talked about Ballarat’s Sovereign Hill and how those who had visited had travelled there. We compared their travel experience with that of the gold diggers, looked at replica shakedowns from those days created by artist Dr Flossie Peitsch in acknowledgement of the shelter sheds Caroline Chisholm built especially for women and children making their way to the goldfields. After I showed the group a photo of my favourite local building, Flemington Post Office, the children shared theirs and with Rhiannon’s guidance produced their contributions to the collage.
Maureen Ryan Director, Gallery Sunshine Everywhere
Some folk might be interested in submitting an abstract for a special edition of Qualitative Research Journal focusing on public pedagogy research. The issue will be guest edited by Karen Charman and Mary Dixon of the Public Pedagogies Institute. Please use the link below.
