Explorations and Collaborations in the Arts

Dear ECA Partners and all others,

This is the website where we will be sharing information concerning the Exploration and Collaboration in the Arts / The ECA Network’s activities and temporarily the new proposed Creative Arts Pedagogy and the Environment / The CAPE Network scheduled to be implemented (pending confirmed funding from Nordplus for Higher Education) August 2019 (see information below).

2018 marked the twentieth year the ECA Network / Turku University of Applied Sciences coordinator’s innovative inter-disciplinary projects have been successfully supported by the NORDPLUS for Higher Education funding.

Please take a moment to view the short documentary “Motion, Emotion – Seven Days in Copenhagen”.  This film is dedicated to the memory of Johannes Johansson (1951 – 2012), Principal of the Royal College of Music, Stockholm, Sweden. You will find this on the “Media” page.

Other videos and pictures can be viewed on the “Physical Cinema” page.

There is a specific “ECA NETWORK PARTNER’S PAGE”, password accessible for our activities and other network related only information.  I will distribute the password to our ECA representatives shortly.

We have a major focus on environmental issues and ways the arts can have a positive impact on communicating global warming and other concerns affecting our planet.

“Science and climate change is fiendishly complex, and what the artist can do is to take these global abstract notions and somehow craft them into a narrative, a story, on a human scale”
– David Buckland, Director Cape Farewell  http://www.capefarewell.com/

Over the past 20 years, NORDPLUS Explorations and Collaborations in the Arts / ECA Network (and the related collaborative networks since 1998) partners established an interdisciplinary educational approach to the arts.  With these experiences, we now further expand transdisciplinary relations focused upon global warming and climate change. For the 2019-20 funding period, developing collaborative arts and environmental science educational innovations will be the theme of the Creative Arts Pedagogy and the Environment / The CAPE Network. This will be supported with evidence-based scientific knowledge informing the participating art students/teachers, and a mutual focus to share the “creative” process with our environmental science students/teachers: the praxis of arts and science. GOALS: 1. Mentor HEI students from the arts and science to co-design innovative/collaborative creative environmental education projects/curricula.  Prior to Mobility actions and to counter the travel “carbon footprints” students will exchange using digital conferencing. 2. Digital Process Documentation: archiving the results of Mobility supported workshops which explore the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, and Math) approaches to creative environmental education.  3. A CAPE Network-wide digital online live April 22 2020’s 50th Anniversary “Earth Day” celebration exchange. 4. An Intensive Course: MOVEMENT, ART, SOUND, SCIENCE:  M.A.S.S. HEI partners from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania form the CAPE Network.  Two new members join the CAPE Network: the Nord Universitet, Bodø‎ Norway and the Faculty of Education, University of the Faroe Islands; Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.  Both institutions bring expertise towards arts pedagogy and environmental science.

In the new CAPE Network, I look forward to working for and with you all to develop innovative NORDPLUS Intensive Courses, workshops, and hope many of you have the opportunity to participate in these activities as well as the mobility/travel and exchange possibilities for both students and teachers.

We are able to accomplish by working together, what we cannot do as individual institutions.

Best regards

David Yoken
Co-ordinator, ECA Network

January 2019

The ECA Network is supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Baltic Countries through
the Nordplus Higher Education Programme.

Photo: Janne Leimola. The Danish National School of Performing Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark
March 2012