Art Education and Art Didactics at the University of Duisburg-Essen provides spaces for experimentation, reflection and academic research in order to translate artistic practice and knowledge about art into educational and mediating situations. Art education discourses offer theoretical and practical concepts that have changed over the course of the discipline's history, also in relation to contemporary art and socio-political conditions and issues. For this reason, related theoretical areas such as educational science, psychology, social science and communication science are important areas of reference.

The professionalization of future art teachers at the university includes applying knowledge of art studies and individual artistic experiences of art practice to ideas for situations of artistic or art-related work with others. If one's own student biography is not to remain the guiding principle for the professional actions of tomorrow's art teachers, it is important to invite them to individually translate their artistic experiences for their own attitudes and new role models. The approach of research-based study enables experimentation, a change of perspective and theory-based reflection as well as a connection to contemporary knowledge about children and young people, schools, educational landscapes and art education.

From a didactic perspective, what is interesting about the subject of art is that every artistic work also determines its mediation space. There are current tendencies in the art discourse in which artists take these spaces of mediation as their theme and work on questions of communication with viewers and spaces for participation and aesthetic experience. These spaces of mediation pose questions about content and its reception and about authorship, mediality, culture or subjectivity in a new way.