Contemporary art requires that art and cultural educators reposition encounters with artefacts, images and performances into a context for new discourses. Whereas digital media and other aspects of visual popular culture predominate the frames of reference of school‐age children, their context (codes) of reference, in large part, do not contain those used by art and cultural education professionals. Most art professionals (con)textualise their interpretations from a more formalistic tradition, unlike school‐age children, whose use of iconographic elements from their experiential subcultures, are projected into the content of their visual encounters. In order to find relevancy for today's art education, interrelationships between the codes of the participant and visual experiences must be built upon the development of new strategies between viewers, artefacts and experts. This article presents the background and use of dialogic strategies for new discourse from the‘Open Dialogue Club’programme between the Department of Art Education at Charles University and the Galerie Rudolfinum, a contemporary art space, in Prague, Czech Republic.

This article explores a spatial model of culture and the intercultural gaze. It is informed by action research carried out with 40 pre-service and practising non-specialist teachers in the Czech Republic. Personal and cultural identities were examined through discursive encounters with various forms of others. The authors use the Japanese term nora inu, which refers to a stray dog constantly on the move, as a multi-layered metaphor for moving beyond narrative pedagogy towards a spatial view of cultural identity. The research was conducted as part of an education programme devised for Shmei Tmatsu's exhibition Skin of the Nation at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague in 2007. Our analysis of the discursive spaces created by the participants reveals cross-cultural challenges and supports the idea that culture is an interactive field in which intertextual space is co-inhabited by intersections and border crossings between and through all others.

When A Genomic Portrait – Sir John Sulston by Mark Quinn appeared in the London National Portrait Gallery's exhibition in 2001/2, the ensuing public controversy over its portrayal raised a number of questions about the representation of a publicly known figure. Because the portrait was the Gallery's first contemporary commission using specialised, scientific procedures in its creation, a number of issues arose surrounding its authenticity. How questions of authenticity are answered depends upon how the viewer reads aspects of scientific coding as it functions within the artistic domain. This is a form of visual literacy that depends on the viewer's ability to lift the veil that operates between coding systems and the context of their use. Literacy in this case is built upon the relationship between visual interpretation and ascribed systems of meaning within the context of their recontextualisations. By playing with the intersections between artistic and scientific discourses, the authors investigate how the representation of identity functions as a polysemy across different semiotic domains. Using visual semiotics to examine the intersections between sign systems across these domains, some of the communication aspects of how new modes of art function in present‐day communities are provoked. By illustrating the complexity of this process as a part of transforming expert knowing into pedagogical practice, support is given for improving teacher education in the arts and cultural domain.

Analyzing cultural sector reports and initiatives in Portugal in relationship to recent reductions in cultural funding, this paper critiques the divide between discourses for knowledge economy development, sustainability, the educational preparation for art and cultural managers and its sector employment. Conjectural discourse is used as a tool to speculate on the basis for a new palimpsest that includes field-based thinking and human development through creativity to integrating cultural development skills into business management programs, and transform cultural decision-making at the EU policy level. Referencing the concepts of umwelten from biologist Jakob von Uexküll, and Human Scale Development from Chilean economist Manfred Max-neef, the paper argues for the benefits of instability and the need for the redesign of management education to integrate culture and skill sets for managers emphasizing creativity. Following upon the work of Max-Neef (1991) and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (2014) investigation of human needs satisfaction through a transdisciplinary approach to structural transformation of economic systems, different educational, policy, and strategic initiatives for cultural development can be developed. By creating epistemological shifts in worldview and strengthening the human capacity for creativity in education, the current miasma in cultural unsustainability can be productively inverted.