Major concepts throughout the research:

• Experiences with art are primarily cognitive: making our own art or experiencing the art which others has made is, overall, a cognitive experience, as opposed to a technical one, with technical experience depending on and informing our thinking
• Visual art has special potential to help us to develop our metacognition (understanding and developing skills for thinking and learning) and through this, to empower our ‘voice’
• Imagination is critical in cognition and metacognition and visual art has a special value in supporting the development of imagination, therefore we should seek to raise the status of art and imagination in education
• Because they can support our thinking and our ‘voice’, visual art experiences, focused on thinking skills such as imagination, creativity, critical thinking and communication, can be used to tackle educational exclusion and support social justice by developing agency