Building Bridges to Promote Contemporary Art and Culture

This chapter discusses how the concepts of contemporary art and culture are developed through interdisciplinary approaches in a Higher Education Institution in Portugal and examines how cultural learning of art students can improve their sense of identity and experiential knowledge of different cultural contexts by using bridges between different school subjects with the aim (i) to extend cultural competencies appropriate for an effective artistic animation in a cultural context, and (ii) to enable students to know and understand the postmodern world as a mosaic of historical and sociological influences. By using interdisciplinary approaches, students and agents of culture from different contexts can learn a lot about their experiences by using photography and sharing their educational resources. The project presented in this chapter shows the numerous potentialities of such pedagogical strategy and how Higher Education Institutions are willing to take risks when teaching new concepts, in this case, about contemporary art and culture through artistic animation and photography. All the participants concluded that using the interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning art enhanced students’ cultural competences by increasing their engagement in inquiry and building new and wider opportunities for contact dialogue within their own and other cultural, national, and international contexts.