Employment insertion is one of the main concerns of this master’s degree. Several professional fields are connected to the training provided in this programme, ranging from the most traditional areas related to arts education, both formal and non-formal.
Although this master’s degree is not primarily a professionally oriented programme, our graduate study indicates that up to 48% of students find employment within two years after completing their postgraduate studies. Based on the available data, a significant portion of them work in areas directly related to the training provided by this master’s degree.
Today’s “arts education” has moved beyond the school. Nowadays, arts education engages with a wide variety of issues beyond traditional educational concerns (learning, curriculum, planning, teaching…) or the classic topics of visual arts education (aesthetic education, creativity, children’s drawing, learning artistic techniques, etc.). Today, arts education also addresses much more subtle matters related to identity, culture, art therapy, emotional education, the construction of the individual, critical thinking, gender issues, peace culture, teaching methodologies, social intervention, inclusion, cultural mediation, ethics, memory, family, parenthood and motherhood, health, and more.
Likewise, contemporary artistic creation has moved beyond museums and has become political. This means that it now engages with a wide range of vital and existential issues in which education is, in one way or another, deeply interested. From this perspective, it is difficult to argue that any artistic topic could be considered “outside the educational sphere”.
At the same time, arts education is a profession that is still not fully established in our societies; rather, it aims to carve out spaces within the job market by training professionals who use visual languages with poetic content, design perspectives, knowledge organisation, methodological depth, and practical learning aligned with concrete competencies from a social standpoint. For this reason, the effort to promote the employability of graduates must be continuous, encouraging the development of new fields such as cultural mediation, inclusive education, museum education and public programmes, cultural centres, socially engaged artistic practices, social and cultural collectives, art therapy, and more. All of this is combined with the urgent need for educational intervention in formal education, where initiatives are required to make the arts a far more central discipline in teaching and learning processes—reinforcing within society the immense value and ongoing necessity of art for sustaining our humanity.