Education, mental health and the arts all share a concern for human beings and for how they live their lives. Living one’s life, and living it well, has always been a challenge – life never simply happens. But what the particular challenges are, differs from time to time, from location to location and even from individual to individual.

This collection stages conversations between art, education and mental health around the question of what it means to be human today. Moving beyond the suggestion that this requires ‘strong’ educational or therapeutic interventions or can be resolved by means of individual expression, the chapters explore new possibilities for 'the arrival of I’ – for the humanizing work of art, education and mental health in the world today.

Gert Biesta is professor of educational theory and pedagogy in the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Lisbet Skregelid is professor of art education in the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Agder, Norway.
Tore Dag Bøe is professor of mental health care in the Faculty of Health- and Sports Sciences, University of Agder, Norway.

Education, mental health and the arts all share a concern for human beings and for how they live their lives. Living one’s life, and living it well, has always been a challenge – life never simply happens. But what the particular challenges are, differs from time to time, from location to location, and even from individual to individual.

In both education and mental health there is a strong pressure to think of being human as a technical problem that in some way can be ‘fixed’ by powerful, research-based interventions. Also arts are quickly turned into an instrument for fixing problems. While such fixing may be possible, and may appear to be quite successful from one perspective, it clearly runs the risk of turning students and clients into objects – things to be acted upon, rather than human beings to encounter and act with.

This book stages conversations between art, education, and mental health around the question of what it means to be human today. Moving beyond the suggestion that this requires ‘strong’ educational or therapeutic interventions or can be resolved by means of individual expression, the chapters explore new possibilities for 'the arrival of I’.