‘Beneath the Veil There is a Woman … Like all other Women’: Women and Transformative Learning in the Visual Arts in a Cross-Cultural Context

Abstract

This paper contextualizes and analyzes a study of an ongoing series of visual arts workshops for women, commissioned from the Centre for Continuing Studies, Edinburgh College of Art, by clients in Dubai. The focus of workshops was on women from the Gulf taking ‘leadership’ courses in Dundee, but they were also vehicles for Gulf women to engage in visual arts education in a cross-cultural context which offered them novel lifelong learning pedagogical strategies. The study's primary question was how visual art practice could offer non-art specialist women from the Gulf new routes to achieve transformative learning and renegotiate a broad range of cultural expectations. Findings showed that exploring their creativity helped the women to enhance their confidence through a changed sense of self; navigate cross-cultural contexts; and locate devices for remapping personal boundaries. These findings also suggest the potential for arts education to open up new possibilities for women to work in museums and galleries in the Gulf where ‘culture’ is a increasingly significant economic driver.