ICLS Symposium | iY-6_VALUE-OF-ARTS | From Enrichment to Essential: The Value of the Arts in Learning and Education

This symposium positions the arts as central to learning. Arts-based education has been shown to cultivate creativity, empathy, and cultural awareness, while supporting academic achievement and well-being. Despite this, the arts remain marginalized in curricula, with funding cuts and narrow evaluation frameworks obscuring their value. Responding to calls to advance knowledge on learning in and through the arts, this symposium seeks to demonstrate approaches to valuing the arts through six contributions that show methodological and theoretical innovations, alongside purposeful partnerships, that capture the value of arts-based education. The symposium will include roundtable presentations within a participatory fishbowl and co-creation of a tangible emotional cartography of insights, advancing future directions for evidencing the value of arts-based education through research, policy, and practice.