Le cours d’histoire de l’art en Belgique : varier les connaissances pour s’adapter à la diversité ?

In Belgium, art history is not part of the mandatory cursus in French-speaking secondary schools. Through semi-directive interviews, we asked teachers about the difficulty of teaching art history. One of the obstacles they reported is the diversity of their students, with religion, maturity, social and ethnic origins coming on top of the list. We also set up focus groups so that students in the last year of the secondary degree could express their thoughts about art. Among other things, it appears that these students show some serious interest in non-European art, mainly art from Latin America and Japan.
The main question of our research is how to better prepare art history teachers and their students confronted with diversity? Another question is how to establish links between the school programs and what the teachers and students expect from the course. As more and more people immigrate to Europe, teachers are confronted with difficulties based on their students' origins. This in turn may lead to misunderstandings and even trigger conflicts between teachers and their new students (Verbunt, 2005). At the same time, sociologist Danièle Hervieux-Léger (2002) reports the slow yet continuous erosion of believes in Europe in the last decades. As a result of this, many students lack historical religious background, something that does not ease understanding of the past and present world (Debray, 2002). Teaching art history helps eradicate biases and promote tolerance. The art history course offers a perfect opportunity to teach and discuss the relationship to other people while art plays a significant role in social change (Anderson, Gussak, Hallmark and Paul, 2010) and reconstruction (Cahan and Kocur, 2011). The objective of this communication is two-fold, describing the current situation of art history teaching in French-speaking schools of Belgium, and provide teachers with a toolbox in order to teach art history while taking into account the diversity of the students and their expectations.