This master’s programme centres on the combination of art, education, and practice-based research. You will be encouraged to turn practical knowledge into action through artistic research. The programme draws on multidisciplinary methods and traditional art forms such as dance, music, visual arts and theatre.
Working in social contexts brings significant challenges, where ethical questions are always part of the conversation. That is why participatory action research and issues-based art play an essential role in your day-to-day practice. Within iMAE, you will learn to protect sensitive personal and community stories and to situate them within a safe narrative-research framework. You will also develop the skills to listen carefully and to ask questions with thought and care.
You learn how to plan projects professionally and present them for evaluation and feedback. In addition, you will use reflective research methods to document your work and share your ideas and outcomes with diverse stakeholders. Thanks to our Site-Specific Colleges, you will build professional portfolios with text, images, video, audio and other forms of creative output that match your interests and goals. Your graduation portfolio will be as unique as you are – giving you a strong foundation for your future professional career.
You will collaborate with practitioners and other professionals who support you and provide feedback, helping you stay true to yourself while meeting the programme's expectations. Previous students have come from China, India, Pakistan, South Korea, Russia, Latvia, Poland, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Catalonia, Great Britain, Ireland, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Egypt, Syria, the USA and, of course, the Netherlands.
To support your development as an artist-educator, we use a range of pedagogies. Our core pedagogy is learning through experience: you spend a period embedded in a community or group, building your knowledge by designing, implementing and evaluating artistic projects in real-life contexts. Our Site-Specific Colleges are a clear example of this pedagogy.
A distinctive feature of iMAE is the Site-Specific Colleges (SSCs): learning spaces outside the traditional academy, embedded in society. You will work at locations where social, cultural or political issues are strongly present – for example migration, inequality, conflict and cultural marginalisation.
At an SSC, you collaborate with local artists, activists, and organisations, developing research questions together with the communities involved. You will live, work and learn on site, which makes your practice more concrete, expands your professional network and deepens your experience in both local and international contexts.
Past SSC locations include Northern Ireland, Morocco, Belgium, Israel/Palestine and the Netherlands.
These key terms and concepts are used throughout the programme:
Issues-based art (education) – the issue you are working on becomes the focus of your work; art is the means to express your perspective on that issue.
Socially engaged art as research – you learn how to address complex social problems through research grounded in your own artistic practice.
Educational studies research – as an iMAE student, you will conduct research into educational programmes, using narrative research as a key method (collecting data through stories and related artefacts).