This is my first blog post, so please be nice :).

At present I am reading the academic works and articles by Eleonora Belfiore, whom takes a critical and instumental approach to assessing the value of the arts – as a means of alleviating social exclusion. She addresses with great comprehensive the issue of quality when delivering arts programs which aim to alleviate social exclusion and draws on a number of examples and references, of which I am tracking down!

I feel that there are a few key ways of framing the arts, within the umbrella of social exclusion:

a) Direct interaction with public artwork – which can make people feel better about their communities and environmental surrounds.

b) Arts as a underpinning subject matter for all subject areas within education (primary, secondary, tertiary) which can be used to explain, explore, relate and identify with peoples own identity and morels. This idea is very similar to that of Christine Ballengee-Morris (2001), in her paper Multicultural Art and Visual Cultural Education.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf