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8.1 Quality in cultural mediation: current activities
In recent years, many countries have seen professional societies, associations, institutions and research centres begin to address the issue of quality in cultural mediation. One result of such activity has been the formulation of framework specifications, in the form of guidelines or criteria lists. Examples include funding institutions like Pro Helvetia, which have formulated criteria in order to make the basis for their cultural mediation funding decisions transparent to the public or
→ mediamus the Swiss professional association for museum education which published a trilingual occupational profile containing implicit quality criteria. The French association of
→ médiateurs culturels and its
→ German-speaking counterparts have developed charters of professional ethics and quality guidelines.
Another result of the emphasis on quality seen in many countries, including in Switzerland of late, has been the launch of a growing number of quality development measures: e.g. the creation of prizes, such as the award for musical education offered by network
→ Netzwerk Junge Ohren, the
→ Cultural Mediation Prize of the Swiss canton of Solothurn and, to provide a non-Swiss example, the United Kingdom’s
→ Marsh Award for Excellence in Gallery Education Other such measures include a growing number of
→ advanced training courses in all cultural domains and of symposiums to enable cultural mediation professionals to exchange experiences and knowledge – an example for Switzerland here would be the annual conferences held by
→ mediamus or those of the theatre education association
→ Theaterpädagogik Schweiz. Also noteworthy are the relevant and ever more numerous
→ activities at the universities of the arts, teacher training universities, and other universities, often carried out in partnerships with cultural institutions or the
→ forums on cultural mediation, which Pro Helvetia organized jointly with certain other funding organizations.
One can also find examples of the systematic implementation of quality management processes intended to improve and monitor operational processes, primarily at the interface of cultural mediation and music. The music school association
→ Musikschulen Schweiz , for example, developed its own nationally recognized certification system called “quarte”.
Finally, there have been studies and research projects which are working on approaches to evaluation appropriate for addressing the challenges of assessing quality in the heterogeneous field of cultural mediation. One example currently much spoken of is the international study on music education “Exchange – die Kunst, Musik zu vermitteln. Qualitäten in der Musikvermittlung und Konzertpädagogik” [Qualities in Music Mediation and Concert Pedagogy] by Constanze Wimmer, published in German and English [in summary] in 2010 (
→ Wimmer 2010).
In her study, Wimmer emphasizes that quality is not “something quiescent or self-contained, but rather it is a process which is continually rendered more precise in the discussion and evaluation of the stakeholders.” In the summary of her results, she defines three quality dimensions in music and concert education, which lend themselves to being transferred to other domains of cultural mediation as well: structural quality, which concerns in-house cooperation and communication, funding, project management and collaboration with cultural and educational institutions; process quality which has to do with the artistic and educational concept and opportunities for audience/participants participation; and finally product quality, which assesses artistic and educational execution. This section draws on these quality dimensions in an attempt to formulate principles to guide the evaluation of cultural mediation.
