Entrance Examination – Education in the Arts

The Institute for Education in Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna offers teacher training programs covering the following subjects:

• Design, Architecture, and Education - Contextual Design
• Art Education - Art and Communication
• Textile Arts - Fashions and Styles

These teacher training programs qualify graduates to teach the subjects of Art and Communication ("Bildnerische Erziehung"), Contextual Design ("Werkerziehung"), and Fashions and Styles ("Textiles Gestalten") at state-run and private educational institutions. The courses offered are designed in such a way as to enable students firstly to acquire interdisciplinary skills in the fine arts and purpose-oriented design, and related fundamental skills in technology and media, and secondly to engage in reflection based on insights from cultural studies and in the practice and theory of being an educator of art and culture. The programs are geared to provide students with extensive skills which go beyond teaching qualifications and make graduates suited for work as cultural educators, in art and cultural studies, and in design and artistic fields.

While the teacher training programs Art and Communication, Contextual Design, and Fashion and Styles are each focused on different aspects of cultural activities, they are also integrative in nature. The mutual interrelatedness in diversity aims at breaking with historical conventions determining cultural education both within schools and elsewhere. In terms of methods, this is reflected in a focus on interdisciplinarity and the constant probing of connections between cultural production, reflection and communication. Continuous work on and critique of methodologies is of central importance. At the content level, it means that the notion of culture is expanded to cover everything from art to design, fashion, architecture, urban life, and textile practice; more specifically it refers to a growing inclusion of everyday culture in the themes and forms of practice which tuition focuses on. In this context, everyday culture should be taken to mean a broad range of expressions of contemporary life, both urban and rural, connected as much with pop, style, and practices of resistance as they are with folk culture and rituals of adaptation, and equally well versed in new technologies and old craft traditions.