Conference Agenda

Dance can be examined by many research methods in many disciplines, such as psychology, pedagogy, ethnography, and cultural anthropology. In most cases, the target group of those studies is adolescent professionals or pupils in K-12 education. Therefore, recent research focuses especially on dance research in higher education. We hypothesized that besides the description of best practices and qualitative studies, quantitative empirical studies could also be found in tertiary education because of the research activities of higher education.

There is a lack of empirical research in tertiary dance education, especially in Europe. Studies from countries whose first language is English are overrepresented. The advantage of the present research is that the actual state of the multidisciplinary dance research in higher education is mapped regarding (1) the most frequently examined dance types in dance research; (2) the countries most typically represented in dance research in higher education contexts, and the local characteristics of dance research in the given context; (3) the tendencies in research design; (4) the types of research instruments; (5) the most highlighted research topics in dance research in the last ten years.

According to P21’s skills map on arts (Dean et al., 2010) and Scheff et al.’s Dance and 21st Century Skills Poster (2014), the skill set to date involves identical components such as critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, creativity, innovation, information literacy, ICT literacy, flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity, accountability, leadership and responsibility, as well as interdisciplinary themes. The question arises, to what extent the latest research in the field of dance in higher education contexts covers the range of desirable 21st century knowledge domain, and where there may be gaps.

In the research related to dance, there are mostly case studies and action research with the reflection of the trainer about good practices in dance classes (Baran, 2020; Petsilas et al., 2019; Rimmer, 2017; Roe, 2017; Stevens et al., 2020), and the empirical studies following a quantitative research paradigm seem to be underrepresented. These research are Motion Notation studies (Dilek & Muhsin, 2017) or related to dancers’ health state (DiPasquale et al, 2021).

With the present literature review, we intend to provide an overview of the current knowledge about research in dance education with the aim of finding out what is already known from previous research. Nevertheless – according to Newman & Gough (2020) –, this research method could not only be used to answer questions about what we know but also for what we do not know about the chosen phenomenon. In our systematic review, we use the common set of processes described in Systematic Reviews in Educational Research. Methodology, Perspectives and Application (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2019).

According to that, our research questions were:

• Is there a dance type that is better represented by empirical research?

• Are there geographical patterns in dance research?

• Which research design is more frequently utilized in dance research – quantitative or qualitative?

• Are there any validated instruments for research in dance, or rather measuring instruments of other disciplines are used in dance-related research as well?

• What are the main topics of recent dance research?

Objective:

The present study aims to explore, through a systematic literature review, what research has targeted dance students in tertiary dance education in the last 10 years and what kind of emerging research methods and instruments are used and developed in this area and where the possible gaps are.

In the current study savoring art, self-efficacy, and subjective well-being, were measured among students as possible predictors of personal growth. Although studies have shown correlations between subjective well-being, self-efficacy, and savoring art, no study has examined the relationship between these characteristics and personal growth among students, taking into account students’ characteristics such as diagnosis of learning disabilities or ADHD, and time spent learning versus the time devoted to paid work. Thus, the aim of this study is twofold. First, to explore the predictive association between students’ characteristics and personal growth. Second, to provide evidence regarding the relationship between personal characteristics (e.g. subjective well-being, self-efficacy, and savoring art) and students’ personal growth.

Studies were done over the years in an attempt to profile an effective learner, by examining learning strategies, best applied for a certain goal (Chamot, 2014), or focusing on teaching strategies and flexibility in adapting them to the need of the times (Vaizman, 2022). Psychological aspects of the learner were examined in an attempt to point to desired qualities and conduct while facing academic challenges (Vaizman & Harpaz, 2022). This study places personal growth in the focus in the attempt to fill the gap around self-improvement characteristics of an effective learner.

Personal growth refers to an evaluation of the self in the search for continuing growth, attaching life's meaning to personal development (Ryff, 1995), involving an active and intentional action towards its fulfillment (Robitschek, 1998). Though personal growth was linked to the Big-5 (Schmutte & Ryff, 1997), studies most commonly explored its effect on other variables, and rarely was the way to achieve it examined. The need for a continuing growth and for the consumption of art are close in nature, and considering the implications of COVID-19 on art consumption, performances, and well-being, this study focused on savoring art as a possible predictor of personal growth, a quality presumably less effected during social distancing than art consumption, and therefore measurable despite changes in social conditions.

The positive connection between personal growth and savoring art was pointed to before (Lee et al., 2021). Savoring art, unlike art consumption, is the joy and appreciation one has towards art (ibid.). leaning on selected items from the openness to experience scale, (DeYoung et al., 2007), Lee et al. (2021) coined the term savoring art, and also found a positive connection between it and subjective well-being. This connection is consistent with the positive relation between openness to experience and well-being (Strickhouser et al., 2017).

Additional two personal characteristics were examined: self-efficacy – a key quality in learning strategies, and subjective well-being, which was shown to be affected by COVID-19 (Foa et al., 2020). Subjective well-being estimates a person's satisfaction with their life (Seligman, 2002), leaning on their personal, cognitive, and affective, evaluation of it (Diener, 1994). Both subjective well-being and self-efficacy are personal characteristics that were previously associated with achievements and success (Bandura, 1997). Self-efficacy is considered a key quality in coping with challenges and sustaining an academic course (Pajares & Urdan, 2006). Defined as one's belief in their ability to successfully complete a task (Bandura, 1997), self-efficacy is considered among a person's coping resources while facing challenges and is associated with active approaches toward achieving a goal (Van den Brande et al., 2016). Self-efficacy was linked to academic success (Roick & Ringeisen, 2017), to other coping resources like grit and help-seeking orientation (Vaizman & Harpaz, 2022) as well as to well-being (Karademas, 2006).

In sports, as in other areas of Higher Education, drawing activities are rarely seen as a teaching and research method capable of producing knowledge, sustaining arguments or addressing theoretical content. And yet, visualization methods such as time-motion analysis, motion capture or performance analysis rely on visual-spatial content that we apprehend as a drawing skill: diagrams of movement, free-body diagrams, visual models, and graphic notation. The same cognitive processes of selecting, organizing and integrating information regarding the movement in sports are the basis of drawing activities (Wu & Rae, 2015, p. 5).

Since 2021, we have been studying the use of drawing activities within sports training and research in the Faculty of Sports of the University of Porto (FADEUP) in Portugal and the Porto Biomechanics Laboratory (LABIOMEP). We intend to contribute to the visibility of drawing as a skill in sports education and to develop a framework to promote research and implementation of drawing activities in dynamic sports situations.

Can the visual and performative properties of drawing activities produce a new knowledge of the physical and collective body in sports? What kind of perceptions about the game and human movement in sport are constituted in the drawing activity that could not be constituted in any other way?

Using an a/r/tographic approach to the learning processes in sports, our presentation proposes a reflection on the intersection of two territories: sports sciences and drawing-based practices. We intend to discuss distinct ways of representing the body in motion as weight, flow, space and time. Beyond drawing as an observational and visualization process, recent literature has shown that drawing in sports also opens up a space for introspection in which we can understand the limits of our bodies and the emotional and physical contours that we create between ourselves and the world (Namkung, 2016; Gravestock, 2010).

Despite their differences, there are significant parallels between sports performance and drawing-based performance practices that can benefit from a common approach to the different layers of the physical body in motion. As Bernard Suit argued in his provocative statement, sport is "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" involving physical activity with a comprehensive level of stability. Sport is also a field where social norms and values are embodied, and the ideologies that permeate our culture materialize as effects in the representation of athletes' bodies (Mahon, MacDonald & Owton, 2017). By intertwining different modes of perception, such as vision or touch, body movement and introspection (Kantrowitz, 2012, p. 4), drawing can be a means of accessing the awareness that athletes, coaches and scientists have of the states and emotions of the body in sport. These states are rarely represented only by verbal language or statistical data (Theron et al., 2011, p. 19).

This background implies advocating for an expanded sense of observation and motion in sports, with an impact on the assessment of movement in qualitative/formal sports, the development of reflective practices in exercise and sports for social change.

The aim of this proposal is to consider the documentary theatre practice experienced through a workshop on the aim of Agro-Ecological Transition (AET). It took place a week in December 2022, near Montpellier. The partners worked at the crossroads of the National Support Disposal (NSD) for the French Agricultural Training System and the nation-wide Institut Agro (Montpellier-Rennes-Dijon) agro-engineer higher education. The documentary theatre practice was chosen in order to otherwise experiment the usual AET sessions and understand the skills development. On the one hand, the sensitive dimension of artistic practices has already been introduced (Covez, 2022; 2016) as well as the intercultural one (Covez, 2009). On the other hand, the capacity of embodying the agricultural concept through design and culinary theatre has also been demonstrated (Covez, 2017). Besides, since 2019, the agroecological transition has become the priority of the institution. The project creating a mixed documentary activity has been financed through a higher agricultural institute initiative and the ministry of agriculture through the NSD. The framework of the “human agroecology” is used so as to underline “the social representations that structure the relations between individuals, social groups, their practices and environments” (R. Audet, C. Gendron, 2012). Besides, In he actual academic t discussion on transition concept (Hervé, 2022) makes it very much valuable. Then, the systemic and critical agroecologies are not sufficient to analyse the representations and socio-cultural practices that have to change as the lecturers and teachers community attest. Then, the theatre practice mixing high-schools teachers and engineers students, represent a real educational and pedagogical opportunity to experiment a new way of learning the AET.

So the question is: “Can a documentary theatre practice be put to the service of the engineers-student AET education ?”. Actually, the definition of agroecological education does not really exist but rather focuses on teaching professional, technical and agricultural matters. Our aim is rather to consider learning it as an emotionally, bodily, individual and collective creating activity that can be put to the service of a better understanding. In fact, it is as any social activity involving human beings which is very much complex. More than that, the transition education has to be considered in the global climate change and after the Covid pandemic that makes it not only cognitive but also at a very high level of emotions and eco-anxiety.

The hypothesis is that documentary theatre partnership represents a tool for educational change in respect to transition. On the one hand, the practice may create a shared and renewed understanding of the transition notion enhanced by the final work representation. On the other hand, the artistic partnership may help creating an educational situation that can enable the embodiment of change. The practice has also been created in the aim of exploring the developed skills: cognitive, communicative, relationship, emotional, creative, intercultural, intergenerational... that can be put to the service of working as an engineer in transition. We would like to get a better understanding of the benefits for the students, as their profession will consist in change making. The difficulty would lie on the tension to get open to the sensitivity and intellectually complex dimension of Transition. Finally, we think that documentary practice methodology, based on sources and concept work, helps creating a quite integrating and balancing situation with cognitive and bodily activities. The acceptance of the sensitive process inside us and all together enriches but also provokes some unbalance and challenge we have to face to keep on sharing, acting and creating. Taking risks and improving may be put to the benefits of a transition education.

January 2023.

Rehearsal. I'll start today with an activity transmitted to me by a director: "from 1 to 5: how do you feel?". I didn´t use the description of this exercise at any time in the thesis. I say to the actor by my side:

- The exercise researching, just as the artistic practices exist in a place that has both unrepeatable and ephemeral moments on one hand and a permanent interaction on the other.

This description contains the possibility of feeling the characteristic of an opportune moment that lives “in between” – as a dropdown time suspended in the present – and the repetition of actions that implies absence.

With this study is intended to understand how the perception of qualitative time have changed, and what place occupy, in our daily lives. The characteristics of the experience of qualitative time are based in the classical concepts of kairos and otium.

The objective is to conceive possibilities to the fruition of Blank Space (qualitative empty time to be filled significantly), through the convergence of: the analyses of the creative processes of Portuguese directors (João Brites, João Mota, Luís Miguel Cintra and Miguel Seabra); autobiographical experiences; and a theoretical construct based on the writings of various authors.

The research questions present in this study are: How is it possible to build a Blank Space in our everyday lives? – and – What tools used in creative theatrical processes can contribute to the experience of qualitative time through the construction of Blank Spaces?

The qualitative time designation contains a specific meaning that encompasses within itself the characteristics of kairos and otium. An otium that claims a contemplative action, emphasizing the dimensions of freedom and choices for personal benefit and prioritizes the particular experience and involvement (Laidlaw, 1968). A kairos that is identified when an action should take place: opportune and special time; and when a constellation of events presents us with a critical moment for which a creative response has to be given – an infinite individual critical instant (Kelman, 1968; Smith, 1969).

The concept of Blank Space is an aggregator of other ideas noted in the discourse of the directors whose creative processes I chose to study. This design eventually became the core of this thesis, as well as all the borderline concepts and practices that arise from it. Within the theoretical knowledge of the concepts associated with time (kairos and otium) are the practices of “emptiness desiring” (Onfray, 2003) that build a space-time for possibility. The instigating interventions of emptiness result from the existence of borderline concepts, that imply certain actions that can be apprehended throw the process of Theater creations, which are: “in between”, “stand by”, silence, solitude, and forgetfulness. At the base of these constructs is the availability for interiority.

The multiple concepts that this study carries had in its base several authors' thinking that allows to establish guidelines for the theoretical construct. Aristotle (2008) and Saint Augustine (1999) had created a relationship with the main concept and the thoughts of Seneca (2004) allow the definition of the experience of qualitative time. It was, nevertheless, in Blanchot (2001, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2011) that it was found what would become the basis of the practice of Blank Space, as well as their borderline concepts because of his close relationship with the idea of emptiness. The constructions of the “self” in Onfray (2003) implicates the concepts of time, kairos, idleness, emptiness, and permitted to build a vehicle of dialogue with other authors. Extracts from Crary (2018) and Han (2016) permitted an intense reflexivity about the modern way of living time.

In the 21st century, it is essential to think about the skills and abilities that students need to develop, thinking about the future. The main element of the educational process should be social skills, which from the personal level of the student will form the common good of society and the whole world (UNESCO, 2021). Social skills are characterized as a set of skills that promote and facilitate human interaction with other people (Odiņa, 2004). Theater art is a collective form of artistic expression. Theater art has social, educational and therapeutic aspects (Krušic, 2015). Theater art in its essence is based on social skills, most fundamentally - on cooperation. Theater art promotes democratic processes and cohesion processes in society.

In the study, combining the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon approaches, theater art is seen as a form of artistic expression, the main task of which is to promote the formation of the personality of students by developing the creativity of each individual. In theater arts, students can learn acting skills, stage speech, improvisation, etc. essential skills that promote and contribute to the implementation of the above-mentioned task (Skola2030 model program of theater arts).

In the study, combining the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon approaches, theater art is seen as a form of artistic expression, the main task of which is to promote the formation of the personality of students by developing the creativity of each individual. In theater arts, students can learn acting skills, stage speech, improvisation, etc. essential skills that promote and contribute to the implementation of the above-mentioned task (Skola2030 model program of theater arts). Since every pedagogical activity begins with setting goals, this issue is also relevant in the theory and practice of theater art. Studies in theater pedagogy show that educational goals have been studied so far mostly only from the perspective of one actor. In the 70s of the 20th century, in the Germanic cultural space, the educational goals, which are essential in theater pedagogy, were formulated, putting forward the socialization of students as the main educational goal of theater art. (Ritter, Nickel, 1976). At the turn of the century, one of the central educational goals of theater pedagogy is the end result, i.e. a publicly shown performance (Kempe, Winkelmann, 1998), but in the 21st century – aesthetic education (Weintz, 2008) and the influence of theater as a medium (Lille , 2013). The official goals of theater pedagogy formulated in the documents can be in confrontation with other educational goals set by the implementers of the theater art, namely teachers, directors, students, as well as parents. Therefore, the question of how to synchronize/consolidate/integrate the goals of these different groups of actors in the process of theater pedagogy remains relevant. The purpose of the study is to investigate the educational goals of various groups of actors in the operation of school theaters and to develop the methodology of consolidation/integration/synchronization of these goals, developing theater pedagogy as a sub-sector of educational sciences in Latvia.

Gender remains a key determinant of experience in schools and wider society (United Nations, 2022), however while many young people are redefining genders and sexualities in more fluid ways, secondary schools continue to be prime sites for the regulation of gendered and sexual identities, gendered harassment and sexual violence. The critical lack of inclusive GSD curricula and policies, coupled with cultures of silence in schools, means that underlying structural issues of inequity continue (Ullman & Ferfolja, 2020). In this context, research that investigates and mobilises how young people experience and understand gender in secondary education has never been more pressing. Inspired by innovative arts-based gender and identity research with young people (Renold, 2019; Hickey-Moody, 2019), this research asks how what I’m calling affective filmmaking can be utilised as an emergent arts-based method with young people to explore everyday understandings and experiences of gender in secondary school? Further, it considers how the process of affective filmmaking might offer unique understandings of gender beyond binaries to prompt a re-think of existing narratives and potential futures.

Art making as research method is an affectively and materially engaged process that ‘can support the articulation of difficult experience’ (Renold, Edwards & Huuki, 2020, p. 446). Filmmaking as a participatory arts-based method commonly foregrounds narrative storytelling, even when conceived within a feminist posthuman theoretical framing (Rice & Mündel, 2018). This research proposes affective filmmaking as a process for making-thinking (Manning & Massumi, 2014) with and from sensation and materiality (Hickey-Moody, 2013). Affective filmmaking brings the sensory qualities of cinema (Kennedy, 2002) into relation with felt experience through a process of playful experimentation. Thinking with Barad (2021, p. 133), I suggest that affective filmmaking is a ‘specific material practice[ ] of intra-acting with and as part of [school] world[s]’. This paper performs a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007) of student created video ‘dartaphacts’ (Renold, 2018) through ‘transmaterial walking’ (Springgay & Truman, 2017). Transmaterial walking with student video dartaphacts pays attention to gendered materialities of school structures, spaces and their affects in everyday lived experience.

This doctoral research is part of the larger Australian Research Council funded study “Gender Matters: Changing Gender Equity Policies and Practices in Australian Secondary Schooling” led by Prof. Susanne Gannon and Prof. Kerry H. Robinson.

Arts-based research and life writing are underrepresented, misinterpreted, under-nuanced, in the broader conversations about educational issues. In this paper we use arts based research as a democratic means for engaging different voices and multiple perspectives for thinking and expressing ideas in the academy. Arts based research enables an understanding and exploration of the relationship between lived experiences, art, and educational practice as a creative caring space for imaginatively practicing democracy in the contemporary world. This paper offers an excavatory account of women academic’s embodied experiences using artful interventions for enlivening body-mind interrelations and diverse perspectives. Through centring corporeal data as a means of life-art-writing (a synthesis of arts-based research and memory work), we engage care-fully to amplify the place of the body in the doing of scholarly thinking as socially just ethical scholarship. Specifically, this research highlights the role of the arts in fostering democratic participation and practice in the academy.

In academic work, a productivity-driven narrative is unfruitful and lacks an ethic of relational em-bodied-ness. Considering the notion of collaborative care in the broad sense, we use life-art-writing to consider an alternative approach to seek out em-body-ied care and mind and body wellbeing. We are three feminist researchers from Australia and South Africa, and we engage in ‘musing as theory’, which involves “meditative contemplation; thoughtful abstraction; critique as intellectual food; gustatory thinking” (Taylor, 2016, p. 204).

Our objective is to mediate and disrupt the individualistic and competitive discourses in the academy, where academic subjects self-metricise in order to freely practice ethical care for multiple voices and plurality of perspectives . This scholarly work amplifies ways to question the singular stories of the academies we navigate and reframe disembodying contradictions and productivity-driven narratives. From a theory of ethics perspective, care of the self is a relational process which understands ‘self’ – ‘care’ not as two separate entities but “thought together” (Smith, 2015, p.137) as a site for transforming ways “to achieve new kinds of existence” (Allan, 2013, p.27).

Arts-based educational research, as a containing space, opens up ways for dialogue and collective reflexivity to imagine new and different possibilities. We address the question: How can body-mind connections be creatively enfleshed as scholarly spaces to rethink conceptions and practices of democracy in the academy? Bodies inscribed in the ethics of materiality offer opportunities for re-imagining spaces in academia- what they are and how we use them. Finding joyful ways for collective, embodied, ethical care through scholarship can offer solace to women academics in the commodified competitive spaces of the academy.

Our theoretical framework is used to recalibrate the productivity narrative that drives academic work and often lacks the ethic of relational em-bodied-ness. We plug into theories of vital matter (Bennett, 2010), technologies of self (Foucault, 1988), and affective assemblages (Mulcahy, 2012). Neoliberal portrayals of academic lives, as singular formulaic posturings in university settings, are disembodying, dangerous, and unproductive. In academic work, a productivity-driven narrative is unfruitful and lacks an ethic of relational em-bodied-ness. This paper studies women’s academic lives as an ethically relational experience that calls for enlivening body-mind interrelations. The artmaking offers a way to voice and “show oneself, make oneself seen, make one’s face [and body] appear before the other” (Foucault, 1997, p.243).

Young children´s, mostly boys, war play is an ongoing dilemma for teachers and parents around the world. Should war play be allowed or forbidden?

In my short presentation I will enhance what young children explore and invent in their physical war play. Above all, a choreographic dimension that is explored and created with an intense passion. In the discussion that follows I would like us to discuss different aspects and similarities concerning war play and how we approach them in similar or different ways in different countries. In our educational effort to upbring peaceful, empathetic citizens – what are we missing and how can we help each other to be more careful and sensitive in our approach to children? This presentation and discussion has its point of departure in the thesis : "Force, form, transformations - on khinesthetic musicality and bodyworldning in young boys war play" (Theorell, 2021) . The session will have a special focus on aesthetic dimensions, but the discussion is interesting for many fields such as sociology, psychology and gender studies for example, since war play is a very complex phenomena.

This presentation comprises research issues related to the school subject arts education, sexuality education, facts and fundamental values. A content that forms the very core of creating oneself as a young person in society, through body, materiality and emotions. The presentation is based on the experiences from an ongoing four-year (2020-2023) practice-based Swedish study. The research project explores how sexuality education is taught and can be taught in different school subjects from a subject didactic perspective. It is a research projects in which transdisciplinary fosters an ontological and methodological turn in educational and artistic practices. The purpose of the presentation is to analyze how concepts such as identity, norms and sexuality are formed in an arts education context. Sexuality education is an integral part of Swedish schools and referred to as a special knowledge content by the National Board of Education. In the school context, arts can play an important role, not only as offering participatory strategies for the students in more inclusive forms of work, but also as ways to engage in collective processes (Ceder, et.al. 2021). These aspects include both informal contexts such as visual culture, digital media and formal contexts such as education.

The Swedish curriculum for arts education highlights the importance of critically examining content as norms, sexuality and identity. A number of researchers use democracy and participation in the argument that arts education should be strengthened through critical examination of visual culture (Atkinson, 2017, Lind & Hellman, 2020). Through freedom of expression, making images is linked both to the school's mission of both facts and of fundamental values (Lind, 2010). Other studies show that students can express opinions in images that they cannot express verbally; for example, they could visually depict race, but at the same time it was taboo to talk about it in the classroom (Eriksson 2019). Both Lind's and Eriksson's studies point to the fact that images provide other opportunities for expressions than spoken or written text. In a study of the construction of fundamental values in arts education, it is possible to see how the teaching is characterized by a modernist tradition where the practice of imaging is in focus and critical examination is seen as "theory" and thus de-prioritized (Ahrenby,2020).

In the present presentation, teaching is explored as a socio-material and performative practice (Mol, 2010, Fenwick & Edwards, 2013). This approach is useful to investigate the complex and entangled aspects of materiality, norms and relationality (Allen, 2018). Through the theoretical starting point, it become possible to examine the subject didactics as an ongoing process of intra-relationships, a series of material and relational entanglements through teachers, visual materials, governing documents and the transformation of knowledge. Barad's concept of intra-action is implemented as a concept for the practice that is explored (Barad, 2007). Barad uses the concept of intra-action to emphasize that in a research process, the producer of knowledge is always a part of the production of knowledge. To understand matter as mutually constitutive of sexuality, with practices, tensions etc, a conceptualization of what can becomes agentic is used based on Bennett's concept of "vibrant matter" for how things are important actors in the world and its ability to act, create effects and transform under different circumstances (Bennett, 2010).

The proposed reflection draws on the work of a Research and Development Association, A3S, in the research, monitoring and evaluation of a set of arts education projects in Portugal over a period of ten years. We aim to share learning practices from this process, which, from one project to the other, has led us to rethink and reconfigure principles, methodologies and epistemics. Specifically, we will focus on two performing arts projects developed in school context that more directly connect transdisciplinarity with diversity: “Seven Years, Seven Schools” developed by the Portuguese performing artist Cláudia Dias in a set of schools with economically deprivileged students in two distinct Portuguese cities; and “Mutantes” developed by the theatre company Comédias do Minho in ten schools of a more peripheric/ rural region of Portugal and having as a main goal valuing diversity. The students comprise a diversity of territorial, social and educational backgrounds (including vocational and alternative curricula) and the arts education projects have developed diversity-conscious approaches focusing on personal, educational, and artistic levels (Keuchel & Rousseau, 2019).

Within the monitoring and evaluation of both projects, an action research approach has been implemented, by adopting a transdisciplinary way, valuing the diversity of knowledge produced by different disciplines and social actors (from the arts, education, social sciences sectors) and the publics themselves.

The analysis looks at the difficulties, processes and approaches for collectively organizing and producing knowledge from this heterogeneous matrix of– collective and individual – social actors (artists, researchers, teachers, students, funders, public and private schools, municipalities, artistic institutions), allowing to expand the discussion on the ways in which transdisciplinarity in arts education projects is contributing to meet and foster diversity in education and research.

The figure of “research teacher” is a figure widely accepted as a key to educational improvement, even considered synonymous for professionalism (Fueyo and Koorland, 1997; Price and Valli, 2005). Currently, we have found research that refers to the teacher as researcher in the field of arts education (Becher and Orland-Barak, 2018; Jokela, 2018). From this perspective, the figure of “arts education teacher” goes from being considered a mere technician to a teacher involved in improvement and an authentic activist agent of change (Becher and Orland-Barak, 2018). But while highlighting the benefits of working from this figure of teacher as researcher, it also highlights the difficulties of implementing it. Firstly, teachers consider that they tend to make little use of art concepts in their professional development processes (Oreck, 2004), and they also complain about lack of knowledge, lack of time, lack of conditions, etc., to carry out research in the classroom (Becher and Orland-Barak, 2018).

The research model that prevails when talking about the figure of the teacher-researcher is a basic type of action research cycles, in which modifications in practice are tested for the improvement of teaching in a wide range of subjects (mathematics, science, etc. (Elliot, 1991; McAteer, 2013). However, it should be noted that when referring to the case of research in teaching arts subjects, the features of a type of action research as promulgated by Elliot (1991,) should be analysed and questioned, since it is not the same to research for the improvement of a science or mathematics subjects, as it is for an arts education subjetcs. The ontological and epistemological foundations of research in artistic education are different from research in any other curricular area. Irwin (2013), with his contribution of a/r/tography, guides us on where to situate the figure of the teacher as a researcher. She provides a series of considerations about how research in arts education should be based on a close relationship between art, research and education. But it should be borne in mind that although the research carried out under the guidance of a/r/tography has its own characteristic features, according to Irwin (2013) it is framed within the field of art-based research.

However, although a/r/tography can be placed within the broader framework of the art-based research, when focusing attention on the methodological bases of both approaches, it should be noted that they present particular differences (Martín-Viadel and Roldán, 2019). It is especially significant to analyse their ontological, phenomenological, axiological and methodological foundations. This analysis leads to the identification of two different ways of carrying out a research process in Arts Education (Navarro Moral. Forthcoming publication).

- A teacher researcher's approach from the arts-based research strand, in which a basic qualitative, and in some cases mixed, research model is applied (Leavy, 2018a, b).

- A research approach for the analysis of the act of artistic creation itself, where a phenomenological and heuristic research model has to be applied (McNiff, 2018; Moustakas, 1990,1994).

In Spain, we did not find many references to research works related to the figure of the teacher as a researcher in arts education. We find references of authors who have considered the figure of the teacher as a researcher in general, associated with the research-action model (Pérez-Gómez, 1993; Porlán-Ariza, 2011). The field of the teacher as a researcher in arts education seems to be unexplored in the Spanish research context. For this reason, the questions that arise when asking what kind of research is carried out by arts education teachers, what are their problems and challenges when they act as teacher-researchers, are the questions that gives rise to this research.

Education is increasingly conceived of as an instrumental affair, i.e. a technical, strictly measurable enterprise that focuses on learning outcomes, which is thought to be achieved using the most effective (didactic) tools and instructions. Getting to know the world is understood in terms of acquiring particular competences, and the teacher's position in terms of executor of plans and guidelines. The world is thus placed in the position 1) of objects to be known and 2) as something we can control and calculate. This phenomenon has been severely criticized in terms of a 'learnification of education' (Biesta 2007). Equating education with learning reduces it to a management strategy concerned with inputs and outputs guided by the law of educational excellence, efficacy and efficiency (Lewis and Heyland 2021). From the assumption that we cannot predict the future, but must ensure that future can be made - we want to explore whether teaching and school making can be meaningful if we explicitly keep students away from learning in terms of acquiring predefined competences (Biesta 2021, p. 47). Biesta indicates that if we can free teaching from its focus on learningoutput, we can create other existential possibilities for pupils (Ibid. p.63). From this assumption, springs the idea to imagine a studio school. Typical of the art school are the studios where students work in function of their artistic practice. The kind of work in the studio is related to exercises that bring the student into contact with the materiality of things therefore using specific tools and techniques. The work that ranges from woodworking to glass-blowing, mould making, sketching, recording and processing audio, weaving textiles, etc. is not in the first place to bring things into production, but to make matter tangible, manipulable and free for use. The art studio is that place or opportunity where something within the world is made into a 'thing', proffered and free for new or re-use. This way, the studio is the space separated from direct output and use. Art studios are a way of partitioning off a space from certain obligations that are oriented toward instruction, commerce, and management, and hence towards a predefined destination and output . They are spaces wherein expertise, value and authority are in some sense deactivated or rendered inoperative (Lewis and Heyland 2021). Taking this idea into account, in this paper, we explore the question whether it is possible to conceptualize school making as studio work, and accordingly teacher training as an exercise in creating studio practices. These are situations in which everyone, as an artist, can start working together with ‘things’. These practices are not related to a particular discipline, but are a-disciplinary in spirit, as they pre-exist disciplinary demarcations. The main question then is what are the materials and tools of studio school, and more in particular of studio teacher training?

During this presentation I will describe a collective research project with teachers in which I participate as the main researcher. The focus of the presentation will be to show the methodological experiences we had, particularly in relation to the production of collective art-based narrative testimonios (through collage and text). I will also examine some data produced through these methods and explore some theoretical/methodological concepts that we argue might be relevant for art-based and social justice oriented educational research.

The main objective of the project was to examine experiences and affective repertoires of teachers in relation to practices and interactions with materials and school spaces, both the relations that reproduce exclusions (racist, sexist, ableist, adultist, etc.) and those that challenge homogeneity by creating new literacies to imagine fairer educational relationships. This topic was explicitly presented to the teachers from a posthuman perspective in which we focused on registering experiences of relational becomings between subjects and school materials and spaces. The methodological process to produce this data was also designed to make participants of the laboratory notice the relational production of narrative data and the agency of the materials we used.

The laboratory aimed to; characterize and analyze research production processes in this participatory collective self-study through art-based narratives/testimonios, analyze teachers’ experiences in relation to school materials and spaces that reproduce sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, ageist, etc. exclusions, analyze the production of spatial and material literacies in the teachers’ narratives, and analyze the process of production of individual and collective subjectivities in relation to the experiences as teachers in this participatory and collaborative research space.

Educational researchers from different theoretical perspectives have argued that school spaces, materialities and its affective force need to be assessed and examined in relation to the production of subjectivities, exclusions, and lines of flight (Schmidt, 2015; Wolfe, 2017; Youdell & Armstrong, 2011). This collective laboratory proposes to do this through art-based narrative/testimonios research connecting this field of study with qualitative studies in education which explore exclusion in schools through the narrative experiences of teachers (Conrado Murillo & Henao Cardona, 2020; Slovin, 2020).

I modeled this research project on other experiences which explore educational issues through narrative and/or art-based methods from a posthuman and new materialisms perspective (Aberasturi-Apraiz et al., 2020; Sancho Gil & Hernández-Hernández, 2020). I also entangled this literature with studies that have explored human experience from a Latin American testimonial and feminist perspective (Mocholí & González, 2019; Rivas Flores et al., 2020). Through these theoretical and methodological hybridizations, I aimed to develop a nomadic science approach (Braidotti, 2018) through this project. As the posthumanist feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti argues, a project that seeks to destabilize hegemonic relations and becomings in school has to start from a self-exploration of the experiences of those involved and the production of counter-narratives that dispute the apparent "neutrality" of the hegemonic logic. Braidotti proposes carrying out self-studies guided by the following questions: “(…) what kind of subjects are we becoming? What is happening to us? What kind of subject are we being constructed as, being in the process of constructing ourselves, in a field of deterritorializing forces?” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 181). This collective project explored these questions in relation to the production of exclusions and resistance through intra-actions with materials and spaces in schools and our research team.

This presentation seeks to explore three fundamental iterations of the discourse on the benefits of the arts to education and the constitution of personal identity from the early Renaissance to the present day. Our aim is not to determine whether the Renaissance, or any other period in history, was the turning point for the conception of the modern subject (Burke, 1997), but rather to examine how different projections of this discourse influenced and shaped the persisting notion that it is highly desirable, useful and reputable to be(come) a creative individual.

First, we examine the discourse on fine arts, artistic attributes and the cultivation of creative talent conceived by Renaissance artists in the quest to elevate the status of their craft from mechanical to liberal. In the early Renaissance, painters and sculptors were viewed as executors of ideas provided by patrons or their humanist advisors – they were not considered inventors but imitators. The discussion on ingenium was closely associated with poetry but not typically mentioned in regard to painting or sculpture. Artists strove to change the perception that visual arts involve intense physical toil and sought to replace it with the image of a rational, contemplative endeavour instead. To this end, the perceived logical procedure was to emulate the prestigious humanistic model in newly established art academies, present creative activity as intellectual and embellish artistic professions with the mystical quality hitherto ascribed to poets. Figures such as Alberti (1404-1472) – the first humanist to write a treatise on painting – or Vasari (1511-1574) – who in his Lives presented ideas on how to cultivate artistic ingegno – were, more importantly, responsible for conceptualising the figure of an artist in its modern sense.

Second, we analyse the discourse on the benefits of the arts to education in its relationship with the specific objectives of the mid-to-late 18th century science of police (Polizeiwissenschaft), using the Portuguese case as an example. Police, as understood by political theorists, was a science of state administration that sought to correlate the well-being of each and every element of the population with the expansion of the sovereign’s power (Foucault, 2007). A late importer of these instruments of modern statecraft, Portugal became a prime example of the increasing convergence between police discourse and the principles of modern pedagogy as espoused by the likes of Rousseau, Verney and Sanches (Vallera, 2019). Both police theorists and leading pedagogues agreed that governing the will meant producing conformity as an intimate conviction, an exercise that could only be carried out in the controlled environment of a total institution (Goffman, 1991). Nowhere was this intent more explicit than in Lisbon’s Real Casa Pia (1780- ), an experimental orphanage and workhouse founded by the General-Intendancy of Police whose goal was to regenerate the marginalised into enlightened subjects by training them in a variety of mechanical and fine arts (Martins, 2011; Vallera, 2019).

The relation between art and education found further expression in the contemporary conviction that society and individuals should be continually rebuilt in accordance with the ever-changing expectations and challenges of the future. In the rhetoric produced by international policymakers such as OECD (2018) and UNESCO (2015), a wide range of transformative competencies are specifically modelled on the artist’s aptitudes, which have become incorporated into the universal archetype of the pupil, overlapping the earlier principles of policing and reformation (Szawiel, Ó & Vallera, 2021). At present, the ideal of a creative individual is embedded in educational policies in such a way that aesthetic self-fashioning is presented not as a possible path of self-enhancement but as a universal way of successfully functioning in society.

"The most valuable moments in a student-teacher relationship are those in which the teacher succeeds in igniting an intellectual spark in a student as he penetrates to the student's innermost being." Itten, J.

The present study seeks/proposes to understand how the didactic manual - the textbooks - impacts/influences the learning process, in the specific field of design. It is hypothesized that the Bauhaus visual grammar is the basis for greater freedom in the creation of visual forms and concepts because it is based on pure forms. Consequently, issues related to the area of semiotics and the degree of iconicity of images are investigated, exploring the possibility that the higher the degree of iconicity the more engagement it will imply with cultural and social references.

The study will be based on the analysis of two textbooks developed by Bauhaus teachers: "Pedagogical Sketch Book" (1925), by Paul Klee, with an introduction by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and "Design and form: the basic course at the Bauhaus" (1963) by Johannes Itten. The choice of these two manuals lies in the experimental character that both present and in the transversal need that these teachers expose in the construction of their manuals - both in the theoretical writing of their teachings and in the development of the images that accompany this sharing of knowledge and skills.

The image associated with the text, and both allocated to the teaching/learning processes, and used in the condition of enhancing open and experimental approaches, were seen as strategies that allowed students to explore their ideas and find their own "voice".

These manuals present materials that enable the study and understanding of the elements necessary for their subsequent use in creative processes, in this specific case, strictly related to Arts and Design.
In "Pedagogical Sketch Book" (1925), Paul Klee presents the visual element Point and its dynamic transformation that expands to Line and the structures that result from it. The relationships he establishes between these elements and elements of the world around us make it possible to develop individual reflection, analysis, and responses from the students.
Similarly, Johannes Itten exposes knowledge of color and form theory, such as materials, textures and rhythm, and expressive and subjective forms, and here too, an endless range of skill acquisition opens up which, with the use of experimentation, allows for the realization of diverse results, all with very individual characteristics.

This study seeks to contribute to increased awareness on the part of all those involved in art education, with a special focus on the area of design, of the impact of images on the learning of concepts in the moral, social, and cultural formation of the individual who is building himself as a human being. One of the goals is to identify a series of strategies, inspired by Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, at the level of visual language and layout, that can be applied in the construction of teaching materials such as textbooks or classroom presentations. More generally, we intend to open ways to rethink the importance of design - and all the elements that constitute it - in the construction of the textbook for art education.

"There is no reality. There are no facts, there are interpretations. The truth, or what we call truth, is an interpretation that has prevailed over others."

"El ciudadano ilustre" [movie], Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn [diretors], 2016, 01:50:28-01:50:40, Argentina.

"It's when it's small that the cucumber gets twisted."

[“De pequenino se torce o pepino”], Portuguese proverb

In a world full of images as exemplifications of the (un)desired realities, in a world of books as mirrors of (un)desired lives, textbooks also contribute to the design of identities in a school context. Used in the first years of schooling as an indispensable didactic tool to support teaching and learning, these books (like other products) are "expressions of embodied human labour", as would Karl Marx says, and are carriers of specific cultures. As products of human relations, they combine the desires of publishers/editors with the desires of (inter)national governmental institutions. They are passed on to schools, teachers, students, and carers (parents/grandparents/family) as a valid truth and reality. They embody economic, political (ideological), social, cultural and educational purposes and represent a mainstream. Being a product of the mainstream culture, they can (in)directly contribute to inequalities and discrimination, manipulating subjectivities to a uniform (a desired) identity (Merlin, 2017).

Besides improving the teaching activities and being the primary learning source (Sui, 2022), some of the main and direct goals of textbooks in the first years of school are to teach children to decode letters, words and images. And although they combine texts and images, the attention is primarily centred on the words. Images are given to support the world of words (Duborgel, 1995), and the reasons for their choices can be questioned. Textbooks, as pedagogical instruments with political and educational power, contribute to shaping a collective memory of the people related to them, especially children. In the occidental society, the trust given to the knowledge produced through texts and books (academic knowledge) could be shaken by the rising realities represented in the textbooks. Realities and histories that were chosen intentionally or not?

"[in]visible - [in]visibility of identities in Portuguese 1st grade elementary textbooks of Social & Environmental Studies after 1974" is an FCT-funded project that began in 2023. This paper intends to present an analysis of certain textbooks, considering the possible contribution of their images and representations in shaping specific stereotyped and uniformed identities.

The project team intends to have, by the time of the ECER, the image's collection and treatment completed. The drawing of an archive of identities in images of Portuguese textbooks is being prepared, and the data analyses will be in the course, providing specific contributions to the discussion of the paper.

What have we learned from the work we set since 2016 while teaching collaboratively and developing participatory projects with our PhD students in the Arts Education? This initial question resonates an open process, often experienced in discomfort, through the imponderability of the creative and participatory processes that two teachers originally from Education area experienced during their commitment to a PhD in the Arts Education.

This paper aims at contributing towards a discussion of the research training within Arts Education, by setting the example of the idiotic events as proposed by Atkinson (2022) as a core to a democratic, participatory and intercultural teaching and learning environment in Higher Education.

By idiotic events Atkinson (2022, p. 762) means “a provocation for thought and practice, a questioning presence”. As an idiotic event “does not tell us how to proceed but confers on a situation the power, the challenge, to make us think, as do some art practices produced, performed or orchestrated by artists, or some art practices of children or students”. Then again, this notion “is one that may have the power to make us think or act differently, but it does not offer criteria or guidance by which to do so”; otherwise, this sort of happening “punctures established procedures and produces the potential for a space of speculation in which we might conceive practice beyond the rules and grammars of established practices, a speculative space in which practice can be re-imagined and reconstructed beyond the borders of established thinking” (p. 762). By sorting a way into the idiotic events, Atkison updates and extends the idea of the events of learning that has also been amplified by other researchers (Pardal, 2022; Paz & Caetano, 2019, 2020).

Having the notion of idiotic event as an inspiration to tackle our professional development narratives, built within a self-study, we aim at discussing our learning - and unlearning (Biesta, 2014; Baldacchino, 2019) - processes, considering our intercultural and collaborative class environments. In fact, all class groups carry important cultural differences, such as the country of origin (mostly from Europe and Latin America), and come from a wide spectrum of areas, such as Dance, Theatre, Visual Arts, etc. This heterogeneity continuously makes us experience idiotic events, as the cultural gap is very easily provoked during the class dialogues.

Ever since we started to teach at this course we kept diaries, notes, and also developed a wide range of other sorts of productions (drawings, paintings, etc.), which give an account to this sort of events and that are to become the main sources of this research. The main aspect we wish to understand acknowledges the importance of our student’s defying presence and collaboration, but is centered at our own learning processes as teachers and researchers.

Questions such as: 1) how have we produced a teaching and learning ethics? And 2) How have the idiotic events borne a negation within a democratic framework? are to be key elements of this inquiry.

In this project, bachelor arts education students and senior researchers conducted collaborative research on digital learning environments in the context of arts education. The aim of the study is to look for new relationships to working in digital environments. The students involved in the research project have completed a part of their education with the use of digital learning environments because of corona. Being now in their final year, they currently undertake their training in the physical studios of our university of applied sciences.

Research question:

What new relationships to educational digitalisation, which transcend a purely functional approach, can we discover together with students in arts education during artistic collective digital workshops and thereby

inspire and challenge students to think and act differently about the digital dimension in arts educational practice?

Conceptual or theoretical framework:

Rationale and project objective

Following the corona crisis, education has been engulfed by a wave of digitalisation since March 2020. Under pressure by the circumstances, efficiency and functionality had to be achieved and teachers were forced en masse to add a digital alternative to their lessons. Digital resources were tools to achieve set goals. Due to the external pressure, there was neither time nor space for fundamental reflection on the meaningful use of digital resources in education. This project aims to make time and space for this in-depth reflection. Together with students in arts education, we look for new relationships between education and digitality that (a) transcend pure functionality and that (b) can do justice to the subject-didactic uniqueness at stake in being a teacher. The underlying hypothesis is that other relationships are possible than the standard relationships to which one was obliged by the situation and which could be considered by automatism as the only possible relationship.

Through the diversions of art

Art plays a central role in this research. Art eminently searches for new relationships to reality and, in the meantime, has previously and more thoroughly searched for forms of digitality that go beyond a mere application of usual classical forms of digital tools. The innovative approach of this project is that, for this research, we draw inspiration from the way in which art has studied the question of functionality in education on the one hand and functionality of the digital on the other.

Project design

The project design foresees for the organisation of different artistic collective digital workshops. Each workshop has a focus of arts as a studio practice. At stake is the search for new relationships between education and digitalisation. During the digital workshops, we collected rich qualitative data through (digital) participatory observation. We will process this ethnographic data through mappings and the creation of narratives (ethnofiction).

Currently, we are in the second project year. Last year, we set up several digital practices in the context of arts education. We combined this with literature reviews. Artworks were also often used as sources. At the end of the first project year, we designed a didactic framework, from which digital art education workshops could be developed. This framework gave rise to the digital art education practices we set up this year.

European dimension:

The use of digital learning environments is not only an issue in Belgium, but in many (European) countries. We want to question the efficient approaches in this project. In European (arts) education, a frequently asked question is how education in a digital environment can have a more explorative, searching and collective character.

Topic. The humanization potential of AITs is currently threatened by various problems, including the risk of homologation of thought and behaviour, that is linked to the current relationship of man with images. Because of the production and diffusion of an unlimited and accelerated visual content generated by the AITs, man is not granted the "necessary distance to face the uncertainty of reflection and imagination" (Morelli, 2010, p. 43), which are absolutely necessary to demonstrate a critical, responsible, participatory and democratic citizenship.

The art created with the AI would allow the new generations to approach early and critically visual culture and contemporary issues related to it, in order to encourage a continuous critical interpretation of the reality and risks attached to the AITs.

Research question. What is the contribution that the visual art experience generated with the AITs can offer in primary school to obtain a critical thinking on the potentialities and problems related to the AITs?

Objective. The paper aims to clarify the potential and the recommendations offered by the current learning experiences through visual art generated with AITs carried out mainly in primary school to promote a critical thinking on the potentialities and problems related to the AITs.

Theoretical Framework. The current human-AITs relationship, due to its complexity, presents great problems because of the pervasive characteristics of the technologies themselves. At the same time, however, this relationship has a huge potential for humanisation that is still to be explored (Ferraris, 2021).

The problematic aspects concern at least two areas: the field of thought and the field of aesthetic experience. As for the first area, we can see how some mechanisms of digital capitalism, directing the modes of thought and behaviour of man, can cause the homologation to the unique thinking (Stiegler, 2015).

As for the second field, that of aesthetic experience, the AITs, because of their diffusion in everyday life, influence and orient our own social categories of aesthetic judgment, becoming the new parameter that dominates the market (Manovich, 2020).

In order to understand the inherent potential of humanization that characterizes the human-AITs relationship, it is necessary to take a step back that can highlight the original root of this relationship. In fact, it was thanks to technology that, since ancient times, man has been able to survive and develop some of his main features.

The main experience that recalls the origin of the human-technical relationship is that linked to art, which is a fundamental and indispensable stage of the evolution of the human species. Many studies based on the possible origin and on the subsequent development of human intelligence, have highlighted the original interdependence between the hand (which allows the technical ability to manipulate objects and to produce artistic works) and the brain (Leroi-Gourhan, 1977; McGinn, 2015).

The birth of art, connected to the moment when man began to produce technical instruments, imply a particular skill in their use. In this way, he was able to overcome the idea of existence in terms of life and death and, at the same time, he was able to transcend material reality to find more hidden meanings (Chiurazzi, 2021).

Consequently, new generations need an early and universal formation that aims to recover and increase the humanization potential that exists in the human-technical relationship and to train the critical and creative skills necessary to manage the current critical issues. A possible way of learning for primary school children could involve art itself. Among the different aesthetic experiences, a very promising one is that of visual art made through the AITs (Biasini, Selvaggi & Catricalà, 2020).

“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” can be read in article 27 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This combined arts- and research-project aims to increase the possibility and opportunity for the participants, who are youth in 6th, 7th and 8th grade at an inner-city school in Oakland, California, to express themselves through art. It is also a democracy project as it gives them a way of using their freedom of expression and increases their understanding and, hopefully, feeling that what they think matters and is listened to.

This art-work-process is deeply connected to our experience that the strengthening of a person’s voice is an important way of increasing their resilience. The cloud that will be created represents not just protection from harm but is, hopefully, a source of healing. Violence breaks so much more than our bodies. It is a fundamental rupture in our sense of meaning and to restore this sense of meaning the experience of beauty, of agency and of community/love is paramount. These are the clouds that carry us.

As a research project it aims to explore how a community-made work of art contributes to the subjectification and resilience of the participants. After the project has been completed the youth will be interviewed in focus groups and asked about their experiences, and what, in hindsight, appears to them most meaningful. This will then be analyzed using Biesta's (2020) concept of subjectification, Tyson's (2019) work on Bildung and meaningfulness as well as Antonovsky's (1998, 1993) concept of Sense of coherence which is linked to health and well-being.

Arts-project outline:

We will create a magic and beautiful sculpture that looks like a cloud made on-site together with participants and able to hang from the ceiling or the wall. The cloud is made for a large number of crumpled pieces of paper upon which the participants have inscribed their thoughts. The cloud carries and protects the thoughts of the participants. It is an image of how their thoughts provide shade from the scorching sun, rain to the dry land and act as a source of imagination as we look into the cloud and find all kinds of shapes and forms in it. This connects our thoughts about ourselves and the world to issues of social and environmental sustainable development, equity and freedom where the cloud becomes the source of both inner and outer (spiritual and material) sustenance, protection and community. It is also symbolic that the cloud literally hovers between the earth and the heavens.

Research question:

In what ways can a community-made work of art contribute to the biographical well-being (ie. the sense that life has meaning and coherence) of the participants?

Since the project is exploratory it is difficult to fully outline its outcomes beforehand. The actual arts-project is scheduled for the last week of February and the analysis will follow in the spring.

In his nonfiction novel The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh investigates the current generation's incapacity to comprehend the scope of climate change in literature, history, and politics. The primary concept of this nonfiction work is based on the assumption that literature will be accused of involvement in the big derangement and blind acceptance of the climate crisis. This paper follows the preparation for an art class that will engage with the topic of climate change and the transformation of the art classroom caused by engagement with this topic. We question in which ways engaging with the topics of climate change, social justice, and storytelling transforms the art class itself. By addressing the challenges of creating graphic narratives (drawn stories) about climate change, we will show how climate change highlights the need to move away from dealing with aesthetics in educational contexts in a purely instrumental manner: promoting arts for their potential to strengthen the acquisition of predefined learning outcomes more efficiently and effectively (Biesta 2017). Following The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin, 1986), we draw comparisons with the traditional creation of what Le Guin calls the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero and its impossibility of doing justice to the narratives of climate change. To engage with the narratives about climate change, we need to step away from traditional visual storytelling and engage in the drawing activity in a different manner. This will enable us to understand the significance of visual storytelling about climate change not as a cognitive or sensory experience but as a new gesture that allows the topic to become an object of thought. Building on Vansieleghem (2021), we seek to understand the act of visual storytelling as a mode of grammatisation in and of itself: i.e. a particular response to an event that allows us to visualize what confronts us. We are interested in the suspension of the usual ways of visual storytelling and in the act of drawing that facilitates the ability to imagine and create new relationships with the world.

In this contribution, we follow a visual storytelling class at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, which comprises students from all over the world. What became apparent very early in the class is that the significance of the topic is visible from European (and the world) contexts. Some of the works produced by this class are concerned with recent fires in Portugal, the environmental impact of the war in Ukraine, Belgian environmental legislation, deforestation in India, and the global impact of fashion. Furthermore, the results were made accessible in a variety of forms. Some students opted to create political banners calling for action, while others offered visual narratives of good practices in their immediate communities. Some performed innovative plays and reinterpretations of the world's most well-known stories. Working in groups, they were subjected to democratic processes of discussing, questioning, debating and eventually producing works that corresponded both collectively and individually. Despite the large amount of artwork produced during this class, we hope not to elaborate on the outputs art generated but on the specific conditions for self-reflection that this class provided. We seek to shed light on how the specificity of the topic within traditional art classroom challenged the norm and allowed space to shape oneself and the world that was being revealed by making.

Context

In France, the national policy programme named EAC “Education artistique et culturelle” (Arts and cultural education) aims at encouraging the participation of all students between K3 and K16 in the artistic and cultural life, through acquisition of knowledge, live encounters with artworks in art places, meeting with artists and professionals, and an initiation to the practice of different arts[1]. Following the official Charter for EAC, the student's curriculum in EAC is based on ten principles. Principles 3 and 4 aim at education in and through art; we see that arts and cultural education is designed as a close intertwining of an aesthetic education, an intellectual education, and finally an education by doing[2]. This triple folded experience is specifically constitutive of arts and cultural education: aesthetic, artistic, reflexive and critical (Marie-Christine Bordeaux & Alain Kerlan, 2016).

Originally, EAC is not part of higher education curricula: however, many French universities have developed “Arts and Culture” programmes that could fall under the same concept: “Bringing art and culture to life at university means pursuing the ambitious project of arts and cultural education that began at school”[3]. We can observe the same goals in all education levels: arts and cultural democratization is the shared concern of the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Culture in France: promoting access for as many people as possible to culture, artworks, and artistic practices[4]. How and how far these arts and cultural practices and programmes developed in higher education promote democracy? In this paper, I will present a part of my thesis project that aims to study the forms that arts and cultural education take in higher education in France.

Research question

What are the forms and characteristics of arts and cultural practices in France's higher education “Arts and Culture” programmes? And how far these practices of arts and culture could be constitutive of education for democracy?

Objective

In this communication, I will present the first steps of my PhD research: a comparison between official texts defining “Arts and Culture” programmes involving students in higher education, and I will analyze their declared goals and potential effects on education for democracy.

Theoretical framework

If we give a definition for democracy: “Democratizing does not mean making the same good available to an increasing number of people. It means ensuring the social distribution of goods so that everyone's individuality is respected and encouraged. A democratic society is one in which each person can benefit from the resources which progressively constitute him as a person, from birth to death, and even in the memory of those who follow him” (Zask, 2003). Out of the cultural democratization manifested by access to heritage and places of culture, and to artistic practices, the aesthetic experience which is singular and thus the most individual experience is the basis and the foundation for this democracy, because individuality is a result of a certain quality of experience. (Dewey, 2005; Kerlan, 2021). Referring to (Schaeffer, 2015), aesthetic experience is experiencing a certain quality of attention to the world, which is a modality of cognitive activity; the aesthetic dimension is experienced by the individual and not a property of the artifact itself (Kerlan, 2021). Aesthetic conduct dwells in the experiences of ordinary life, and its characteristic is the pleasure of being fully absorbed in mental or bodily activity (Dewey, 2005; Kerlan, 2021). Besides, the distinction between formal/non-formal/informal education provides us with the first typology to categorize Arts and Cultural programmes in higher education. (Conseil de l’Europe, 2000).

Working with collective identities has taught me that sameness, along with the ruthless logic of binary opposites, are their basic underpinnings. To address this concern, it is convenient to know from where I stand, which in English language relates to my positioning, the framework that is given to me, the way I see and feel things, in short, my perspective. This condition of visuality is in fact an epistemological constraint (Heidegger, 1999): a limited horizon, just like a pair of eye-glasses that produce naturalized views of the world (Mitchell, 2002).

I tried to overcome these logics, both in the understanding of my topic and in the research process itself, conducted in coherence with my positioning.

This paper intends to be a reflexive account on my research’s development by taking the argumentation ‘from where I stand’ to the point of questioning: ‘where do I stand?’ In relation with the topic of democracy of the special call, the issue here is not to take sides, giving way to binary logics, but to acknowledge how our (mis)perceptions and (mis)conceptions can shape our reality, and how it can affect our contribution to strive for a just and equitative society. Furthermore, and countering the logics above-mentioned, I try to develop coherent research practices that explore rhizomatic strategies, through crossing and in-between fields.

Where do I stand, then? In research it is a legitimate, necessary and even productive question to ask systematically, that I take here as my research compass in order to fulfil the following objectives:

a) To acknowledge the view ‘from where I stand’ and how my everyday experiences influence my positioning in respect to my core values and my research (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985).

b) To define ‘where do I stand?’, as my positioning towards research, in epistemological, methodological, ontological and ethical terms (Hernández-Hernández, 2019).

c) To present several strategies that allow to value the process of becoming for the researcher, the research and the thesis.

d) To identify 'what do I stand for' when pointing the logic of sameness and binary thinking as outdated and inadequate to the challenges of the present.

Dividing is an increasing phenomenon in our times, as we can witness by the number of walls that have been growing since the World War II, with an exponential growth since the 9/11 (Vallet & David, 2012). Dividing, as a categorizing strategy, helps to clarify and untangle concepts but we have to keep in mind, whether in social reality or in our research procedures, not to make the mistake of hierarchizing the elements that we have placed apart. For that we must make the subsequent effort of re-entangle, and sustain in tension, all the binaries that are formed before our eyes.

This exercise of reflexivity on the research process, as well as the process of becoming a researcher, relates to my topic of collective identities but also to “academic identities, including identities as researchers,[which] are forged, rehearsed and remade in local sites of practice” (Lee & Boud, 2003, p. 188). While connecting with the flowing aspects of my identity, defined by my perspective, I reckon the positioning that I am requested to perform (Guerin, 2013), to face the challenges of my social-political-academical environment.

With this reflexivity gesture I intend to demonstrate my attempt to democratise ways and forms of knowledge, nurturing the “need to be aware of the personal, social and cultural contexts in which we live and work and to understand how these impact on the ways we interpret our world” (Etherington, 2004a, p. 19).

A five-year study of an arts and engineering project was judged to have had a significant impact on pupils’ learning and engagement (see Author 2020; Authors, 2019; 2021; Authors 2022). The project, however, was expensive unless funded by external grants. Schools wanted to see how a similar approach could be embedded in their schools. This presentation outlines how the developed T*** approach, theorised from the 5 year study, was tested with 14 primary schoolteachers in 7 schools.

Teacher interviews identified a lack of experience in curriculum design and a lack of confidence in using art-making practices to develop learning. Whilst teachers sought to give children freedom to express themselves, take some responsibility for and enjoy their learning, this was in tension with concerns to cover a packed curriculum, so often remained an unrealised ambition.

Through experiencing, deconstructing and trialling art-making practices throughout a curriculum development process, teachers designed schemes of work. The process was iterative and messy with the T *** model emerging from responding to teachers’ questions from discussions and observations of their challenges and successful use of the elements of the model. The approach was grounded in the real-world practices, structures and cultures the art-makers, but was also responsive to the needs of the mainstream classroom, and attuned to the theoretical insights gleaned from previous research. Through trialling different pedagogies, adopting practice from the previous project and becoming familiar with ‘community of practising art-makers’ (CoP) (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and ‘commission’, teachers planning changed, and they developed an understanding of and confidence in the approach. In addition to the foundational CoP and commission, the model embeds a range of characteristics identified from the professional culture and practices of the art-makers (Ingold, 20130; 2017). An emphasis was given to physical theatre and drawing as engaging and underused meaning-making processes in learning and these were particularly successful in expanding the repertoire of teachers.

Teachers designed their schemes of work over 18 months (albeit with interruptions due to the pandemic), trialling elements in their settings, with regular discussion and feedback from educationalists and artists. Their developing understanding of the model, its educational implications and how it could inform their classroom practice was not an easy process. In the end of project interviews, one teacher talked about coming to a session with what they thought was a really good idea only to for it to be ‘picked apart by you [the educationalists]’. Whilst initially, such moments were disheartening, they were later acknowledged as vital to teacher understanding of the model and having the confidence use it.

In one school, an environmentalist story-based drama enabled students to empathise with issues related to the physical world and how humans engage with it and to think of themselves as a community of environmental activists. Taking on a commission required multiple subject knowledges, but also to think and behave like a member of this community of environmental activists. The commission, situated in the real-world, generated a series of tasks that the community needs to address and through which the majority of the learning occurs; learning-by-doing and/or educative conversations whilst being supervised to address the task; or by direct teaching. In this example, the community’s commission was to improve the ecology of their school grounds by designing and making homes for wildlife. It required the development of scientific, design, geographical and communicative knowledge and understanding but also the ability to empathise, listen, think critically, imagine, negotiate ideas, be responsible for particular tasks, practice particular skills, persist with ideas – to see themselves as necessary and valued members of this community by practising and behaving like environmental activists.

This presentation will discuss a "Drawing to Learn" experience based on a drawing workshop under the microscope. This workshop gathered Fine Arts and Biochemistry students from the University of Porto around biological samples prepared with the tano-ferric method by the Portuguese scientist Abel Salazar (1889-1946). We have reviewed the method of histological drawing that Abel Salazar developed as an observational tool to polarise attention and intertwined it with drawing activities to engage students in observing their own perception.

We aim to identify and explore observation and visualisation practices under the microscope in students with different backgrounds in art and STEM areas. By creating modes of interaction between student scientists and artists, we aimed to empower students to create their own visual representations instead of relying on their observation and study of pre-existing visual models.

Based on the histological drawing method described by Abel Salazar, Microscopic drawing is understood as a form of reasoning through the construction of a visual model that enables the translation of the visual-spatial content.

BACKGROUND

Although the practice of observation under the microscope is more common in scientific study and research routines, it reflects a shared commitment to artistic practice and research: the discovery of new visible worlds. With this expression – discovering a new visible world – the scientist Robert Hooke opened his essay Micrographia, initially published in 1665, where he presents microscopy as a new form of visual culture. Aware that two people observing the same sample can see different things, Hooke's notes still constitute an epistemological basis for microscopic representation today. Observing under a microscope involves making visual decisions that alter what is observed and open the way to knowledge of "true form".

After 1932, Abel Salazar developed a drawing process adjusted to the microscopic observation that is still a contemporary tool of learning through drawing, in tandem with biology learning skills (OCR, 2015): to draw is to engage ourselves in a continuous process of polarising and depolarising our attention.

More than an accurate record, drawing under the microscope is an epistemic stance on observation itself. To draw is to create an external visual model used to learn and make science (Quillin & Thomas, 2015, p.9). This visual model relates the object to the experience of observation. Like any representation, it is not neutral.

TOPICS OF DISCUSSION

Recent literature on drawing as a means of tacit communication between professors and students in learning microscopy has highlighted its benefits in overcoming resistance to absorbing new information quickly. The habit of drawing for colleagues and students is a natural and necessary consequence of joint observation under the microscope to learn to select and organise information. Drawing together becomes an alternative way of "talking to each other" (Lyon & Turland, 2020, p.7).

Microscopic observation suggests that there are different levels of cognitive engagement between the external visual models generated by students and the mental models that are formed in the student's mind (Ainsworth & Scheiter, 2021). Studies on the role of drawing in STEM areas highlight this interaction, as the brain naturally resorts to spatial information to encode other information, such as verbal or numeric, thus increasing memory and learning capacity (Quillin & Thomas, 2015; Tversky, 1999). Drawing a physical or visual model, such as a microscopic slide, can occur as a result of an already constituted mental model or as part of the cognitive tasks of selecting, organising and integrating information, which structures the learning process and the creation of mental models (Van Meter & Garner, 2005).

Many educators see STEAM education, which combines the arts and sciences to establish more creative teaching practices, as an opportunity to integrate the arts within the school curriculum in order for students to acquire 21st century skills. STEAM proponents hold that the arts can be used as a way par excellence to teach students the innovation strategies needed for the omnipresent economic competitiveness. Critics of STEAM education, however, argue that such neoliberal focus on marketability in education neglect other, deeper educational goals (Graham, 2021). Moreover, as STEAM scholar Graham (2021) points out, in a world facing grave environmental and social problems it becomes increasingly important for students and teachers to contemplate exactly what constitutes ‘good education’ over and against this instrumentalisation. And yet, precisely the arts are often pleaded as possible solution bidders to these problems, under the rubric that they not only have an economic or social binding meaning, but also offer the possibility of self-transformation (Green 2012). They purportedly do so by virtue of their orientation to the (un)human, and to the difference between who we are, and who we can be. However, whereas the emphasis here is still very much on the personal self, in this research project, we want to emphasise a relation to the actual ‘thing’ in need, being the shared world and our relations in it, in order to adequately tackle todays challenges. According to Biesta (2017), to achieve this world-centeredness, we should again look to the arts for an answer. As artistic practices are a powerful way to enter into dialogue with one’s surroundings—with ‘the world’—, to dwell on the question "what is the subject under study trying to say to me?", i.e. "what is it (or the world) asking of me?" (Vansieleghem, 2021).

However, with all this emphasis on the arts, we would almost forget that also the more traditional STEM directions (Science, Technology, Engeneering, Mathematics), were they to transcend a purely instrumental nature, do similarly possess this potentiality (Mehta et al., 2019). In other words, the STEAM initiative does seem like a called for alternative. Yet, precisely because of its labour marketoriented focus on creativity, this initiative also suffers from the shortcomings of the educational system of its time. It is therefore our aim to go beyond these shortcomings by developing a well-founded alternative approach to education that responds to today’s challenges, an approach that we would like to coin as 'Education of the Senses' (EoS). From the assumption that we are facing these radically new challenges, and that we don't know what we don't know, and what thinking should do with it, we want to explore how particular artistic and scientific strategies and practices can be used to help us go beyond knowing: to put the senses (seeing, listening, feeling, tasting) at the core to build ‘a thinking’ on. In this way, framing a STEAM education where we don’t use the arts to merely give STEM a creative component, but to shape STEM through giving the sensory experience a central place. Hence, the goal of this research is to give life to an Education of the Senses, by outlining a foundational framework for the STEAM initiative through pedagogical practices and exercises that develop connectivity and attention to the world. This goes hand in hand with reconceptualising pedagogy beyond the limits of instrumental logic, on the basis of pragmatic ideas such as those of William James, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.

All networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

In this paper I consider the possibility that photography might provide an education from, for and in death. This will involve a necessary dance with clichés – clichés immediately ghoulishly crowd round talk of death: “live every minute” etc. It is perhaps worth noting that to talk about photography is always, in some sense, to talk about clichés – etymologically speaking the word “cliché” dates back to the 19^th century and means: to produce or print in stereotype.

As a prelude to exploring the relationship between education, photography, and death, I consider a famous scene from a film which “appears” to take such connections seriously. The scene in question is from ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ and contains a number of “clichés” (in both senses of the word). ‘Dead Poet’s Society’, is set in 1959 in a fictional boarding school for boys. In the scene in question, a new English teacher, Mr Keating, takes the boys out of the classroom down to the school lobby and begins to teach Robert Herrick’s poem ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’. He notes that the Latin translation of poem’s main sentiment is “Carpe Diem” (or seize the day). Keating informs the boys that soon they will be “food for worms” and encourages them to lean in and look at photographs of long dead alumni in backlit trophy cabinets. Whilst they gaze he whispers carpe diem in a mock-ghostly voice.

I focus in on this scene because it provides one (clichéd?) perspective on the relationship between photography death and education, one I wish to resist. Keating’s ventriloquizing of the photographs, a cliché violently superimposed onto clichés of another sort, is the very thing that blocks the pedgagogical potential present in the experience of being addressed by photographs. For Keating the photographs become vehicles for illustrating the meaning of a poem and, indeed, a wider philosophy that he wishes to convey. In a sense he has seized, where seizing comes close to scrunching, the photographs and encourages the boys to the same.

During the course of the paper I draw upon Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s writings on photography to present an alternative view of the relationship between the photograph, death and education. In Camera Lucida (2000), Barthes presents a way of relating to photographs quite at odds with the grasping approach discussed above. He famously employs two terms - studium and punctum. [MI1] The former accounts for our active relationship to what we see and is associated with learning (). The “punctum”, on the other hand, pierces through the studium to wound: “the second element will break (or scan) the stadium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the stadium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (Barthes, p. 26). The punctum refers to a specific detail in the photograph. There is a subjective dimension to this experience – not everyone experiences the same punctum in the same way or, indeed, in the same photograph. For Derrida, the punctum is equivalent to the spectre, for: “Having to keep what it loses, namely the departed, does not every photograph act in effect through the bereaved experience of such a proper name, through the irresistible singularity of its referent” (Derrida, 2010, p.2-3). For Derrida and Barthes, showing hospitality to what is singular and pierces through, prompts an expressive form of writing. In the paper, I argue that this sort of expressiveness represents a form of subjectification (in Biesta’s sense) overseen by a spectral teacher.

In this paper I consider some possible pedagogic powers in Werner Herzog's documentary film Grizzly Man. This paper will dwell on three key questions. First, what is the sublime and can it be screened in film? Second, what are some core features of tragic art and how might such art ethically educate (if at all)? Third, does Werner Herzog's documentary film Grizzly Man screen the sublime or is the predominant mood tragic?

The discussion of the first research question will focus on Brady who argues that paradigm examples of the sublime are found in nature and involve vast phenomena that cause a mixture of pleasure and anxiety in a human subject. Sublime natural phenomena can include the night sky, huge waterfalls or mountains and thunderous lightning storms (Brady, 2013). Sublime experiences thus usually require interaction between two components. A sublime phenomena or object and a human subject who experiences that phenomena or object with a deeply felt mixture of anxiety and pleasure. There are however different understandings of the sublime and more than one type of experience can be sublime. While a joy filled terror on a beautiful mountain ridge is one paradigm case of the sublime, other sublime experiences may entail little in the way of overwhelming fear of imminent threat to one’s life or wellbeing. Awe or wonder of a more humbling and contemplative sort may be largely felt in place of outright fear. A stargazer may for example look upon the vastness of the night sky and space beyond and feel overwhelmingly small and insignificant in comparison (Brady, 2013). Here the sublime is more contemplatively wonder-filled than life-threatening fearsome.

Brady argues that while the sublime is primarily encountered in nature, artworks can also convey a ‘secondary’ sublime (2013, p 6). She emphasises that second hand access to the sublime through art is not without significance as it can encourage people to feel a sense of humility towards nature’s power. However, she is also clear that artworks cannot provide a full sublime experience. Brady acknowledges that a carefully crafted tornado scene on an IMAX screen could be thrilling. However, she suggests the artistic reproduction will only ever be an impoverished experience when contrasted with the real thing. The natural sublime has a ‘multi-sensory’ dimension (tactile, auditory and visual) that is absent from artistic recreations (Brady, 2013, p 128). The cinematic representation will lack the ‘in-your-face fury’ of a live whirling tornado (Brady, 2013, p 128).

In response to Brady I claim that while cinematic depictions of the sublime are qualitatively different from the sublime as it is directly encountered in nature, the screened sublime is not inevitably inferior just because it qualitatively different from the natural sublime. Instead of relegating the screened sublime to secondary, reduced status because it cannot mirror the sublime in nature (as Brady does) I argue it is worth thinking about how film might offer distinctive perspectives on the sublime, ones that invite viewers to critically reflect on whether the search for the sublime in nature is always ethically defensible and good for people and planet.

I also note that artworks can have aesthetic properties that have educational power drawing on Simoniti (2017) who offers a persuasive account of aesthetic properties in realist terms. He suggests aesthetic properties are real powers that objects have in them to dispose an audience to an experience or response. I claim some films have aesthetic properties that have the power to invoke a sublime response in their audiences and cite Jennifer Peedom's Mountain and Denis Villneuve's Dune as examples of films that screen the sublime.

Research questions

• What place does film currently occupy in Philosophy 4 Children?

• How does film-philosophy differ from philosophizing in the ordinary sense?

• How might a re-appraisal of the philosophical qualities of film change how we think of its (potential) role in the classroom?

Objectives

The main objective of the paper is to show that there might be a more significant role for narrative films to play in the philosophical education of young people if we look beyond its conventional use as an illustrative prompt for reflecting on moral issues.

Theoretical framework

Philosophy 4 Children (P4C) has a long and well-established history in classroom-based teaching, and often includes the use of film as a prompt for young people’s discussion of philosophical issues. These approaches often take for granted a specific understanding or theory of what constitutes philosophical method. Increasingly, both philosophers and pedagogues have begun to take an interest in film as a medium for ‘doing’ philosophy also, although opinions vary as to both the mode by which such philosophising is carried out and the ends to which it is oriented. The convergence of interests here has led to confusion about the philosophical character of film’s place in the classroom: This paper will provide a survey of film’s pedagogical modes and ends, before exploring the idea that the educational character of film may lie more with its cinematic qualities than its reducibility to any preconception of what philosophy does or ought to consist in. 

I take part of my theoretical cue here from a recent re-appraisal of the P4C programme by Tyson Lewis and Igor Jasinski (2022). Lewis & Jasinski argue that Philosophy 4 Children remains too directed in its ‘philosophicality’. Perhaps as a consequence of the increasing need for educational activities in institutions to demonstrate evidence of learning outcomes, they have argued that P4C too has come to desire ends of reasonableness and democracy too much for the exercise to be truly about the individual learner’s voice. Their view is that we should abandon some of the thinking around ends, and emphasise merely the joy of the means: “there is something about letting students speak, about abandoning them to their capacities for speech, about enabling them to adventure with saying what can be thought and think what can be said” (Lewis & Jasinski, 2022: vii).  

Inspired by this idea of an “end-less” education, the final part of my paper explores the potentiality of a Film-philosophy for Children (Fp4C). Film-philosophy for schools could introduce film into the curriculum as a mode of showing young people worlds other than their own, and allowing them the opportunity to give voice to their own experience of film-viewing in response. As a result, the question of what philosophy is/might be remains open, including to the possibility that film both does something different to – and can change the nature of – philosophical thought itself.

We live in times of rapid digital development, where especially the latest innovations in artificial intelligence have come to challenge the status and functions of knowledge and educational practices (Zhang & Aslan, 2021). At stake is not only the survival of the subject matter as a specific content of knowledge worth conserving for future generations, but also the question about what makes knowledge meaningful, relevant and worthwhile studying in the first place. In this paper I will discuss the possibilities for education and teaching to bring life into subject matter, as a content of knowledge, in ways that cannot be done through digital technologies alone (c.f., Stiegler, 2010). In this discussion, I develop the concept of acousmatic teaching as a practice that brings forth the material, sonorous and transformative functions of the subject matter.

In its most basic definition, music is a human form of expression that uses the physicality of air to produce vibrations that encounter and resonate with the minds and bodies of human beings (Nachmanovitch, 1990). On the one hand we can understand music as a vibrating gestalt of sounds that confronts us (Bucht, 2009), and on the other hand we can understand ourselves as musical configurations that confront the world we inhabit (Lingis, 2004). The genre acousmatic music explores the spatial and material aspects of music and focuses on sounds rather than on what produces these sounds. The materiality of the sounding object and the space it creates produces an acousmatic materiality that calls for heightened attention (Bertrand 2020). Jettisoning the idea of music as a linear and rhythmic process founded in a tonal center, we can describe it as a sonorous and acousmatic space in motion that manifests itself through factors that allude to, e.g., nearness and distance, or difference and identity (Rytzler 2023). Acousmatic music calls for the listener to perceive sound with a reduced sensibility to the sound’s identity (Frappier 2020).

If we follow the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière, acousmatic teaching would be about performing a dis-identification of the subject matter in order to make it accessible to the students as well as a dis-identification of the students in order to make them encounter the subject matter as unique subjects (Biesta 2014). In acousmatic teaching the subject matter, by addressing the students, produces a partage du sensible that enables new things to be said, thought or done. As such, the encounter between the students and the subject matter could be described as one of resonance, to speak with the sociological thinker Hartmut Rosa. Rosa (2019) uses the notion of resonance as a productive contrast to Marx’ notion of alienation as it describes transformative encounters between humans and the world. In times where the state of knowledge as we know it is at stake, Rosa's notion reminds us that knowledge is something that connects humans with the world, that situates them in the world and something that lets them discover, encounter and navigate in the world. Bildung, according to Rosa, is deeply connected with resonance. When being in a state of resonance, Rosa claims, we never stay the same. Building occurs when a relevant domain of the world starts to speak to us, when it addresses us. This experience of resonance transforms us, and this encapsulates what it means to exist as a human being.

Dialogic approaches to education have received a significant amount of interest across Europe particularly with regard to the role of language in education (Mercer, et al. 2019). Dialogic theorisations, however, offer a rich array of conceptual tools for exploring space, time, relationships, embodiment and aesthetics as part of educational experience (e.g. Vass, 2019; Kullenberg & Säljö, 2022). In response to recent calls for greater recognition of the aesthetics of education, waking students up to the world (Biesta, 2022), and the importance of contemporaneous educational encounters (Biesta, 2023) this contribution uses the dialogic notion of chronotope (time-space) to explore how interpersonal entrainment, that is a collective moment of unity, takes shape within whole-class music playing in a Finnish sixth grade classroom.

Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope is particularly useful in the exploration of education as a form of aesthetic interconnectedness experienced from the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ (Bakhtin, 1981 & 1986). Examining phenomena from the outside involves attending to the arrangement of space, the relationships between participants, the availability and use of time. Examining from the ‘inside’ pays attention to how participants listen for and respond to one another, interanimate each other’s contributions, sense coming together and differentiate between self and other. Through this ongoing dialogue participants become part of and contribute to something beyond themselves within a particular moment. Music-making, by its very nature, is a form of symbolic and embodied dialogue across time. When people gather together to make music, their joint action is characterised by interpersonal entrainment, that is in-time synchronous interaction between participants through music (Clayton et al., 2020; Phillips-Silver and Keller, 2012). While there is a great amount of literature on music as affective and embodied communication (Clayton et al., 2020; Stern, 2004; Trondalen, 2016), entrainment has often been examined through quantitative, rather than qualitative, approaches and whole class music-playing as part of mainstream education has received little attention to date.

The theoretical significance of this research lies in going beyond the existing metaphor of participation in education to explore education as an encounter in which individuals constantly listen to and map the rhythm of their social environment co-authoring the world through their responsivity (Holquist, 1983; Sabey, 2021, Kullenberg & Säljö, 2022). The aim of this study is to explore the centripetal coming together of individuals through music to create a unified body by carefully mapping the time-space arrangements of a 6th grade classroom and by qualitatively analysing the reflections of students and teachers on their experiences and perceptions of whole-class music playing. The research questions underpinning this contribution are:

1. how does interpersonal entrainment take shape in whole class music-playing within the context of mainstream music education classes in the sixth grade of Finnish basic education?

2. what do students and teachers attend to in their reflections on the embodied, aesthetic experience of interpersonal entrainment?

The educational significance of this research lies in going beyond words and oral dialogue to embodied and aesthetic forms of meaning-making. This research is an important contribution to music education research as the data is from mainstream, rather than specialised, music education highlighting the potential of ‘regular’ classrooms for different forms of meaning-making. Moreover, this research highlights the multiplicity of relationships that are mutually informing and fundamentally present within educational settings. The findings from this study draw attention to the responsibilities of educators in curating and orchestrating learning environments and activities and the active roles and responsivity of students in their individual and shared being and becoming. The key contribution of this study further is to expand understanding of dialogic education as embodied, contemporaneous relationships mediated through a shared, yet-forming environment.

In this symposium, diverse approaches to place-responsive pedagogy are developed. The overall hypothesis is that ‘landscapes’ (1), ‘soundscapes’ (2) and ‘hyperreality’ (3) are concepts of esthetic education. (1) Landscape traces back to the Dutch word ‘landschap’, describing paintings in which the land itself is made the subject of paintings (National Geographic Society, online). Otto Schluter was the first to define geography as landscape science (see Dickinson 1969). There are natural and cultural landscapes. The first of which consists of landforms such as plains, mountains, lakes and natural vegetation. Cultural landscapes are structures of social, civilizational and economic significance that are made up by people. (2) A soundscape (Southworth 1969, Schafer 1977) is an acoustic environment, in which the perceiver is involved. (3) According to Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1994), hyperreality is a technological context, in which imaginaries make us believe that they are real.

An indispensable aspect of citizenship education is the individual’s (physical) integrity and maximum possible freedom to act. How can personal freedom be protected and effectively supported, not only in reality but also in hyperreality? Democracy, or in pedagogical contexts citizenship education, is usually connected to ‘free speech’, or to giving power to citizenry to voice dissent against despotic rulers Diana C. Mutz (2006) and others describe ‘echo chambers’ in social media. Meant are enclosed spaces, in which a majority of people tends to surround themselves with like-minded people by reinforcing each other in their own position. Then, a blurring of the difference of reality and its simulation takes place. Jean Baudrillard (1994) explains such blurring as ‘hyperreality’ that makes the ethical dimension of free speech, namely to respect another person’s freedom, barely perceivable. How can personal freedom be protected and effectively supported in a hyperreal context? By interpreting an online-game as ‘soundscape’ (Southworth 1969, Schafer 1977) in this presentation ‘place-responsive practice’ (Cameron 2003 and Waldenfels 1994) will be investigated in ‘hyperreal contexts.’

Baudrillard, Jean ([1981] 1994): Simulacra & Simulation. The Precession of Simulacra. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Cameron, J. (2003): Responding to place in a post-colonial era: An Australian perspective. Decolonizing nature: Strategies for conservation in a post-colonial era. New York, NY: Earthscan Publications, p. 172-176. Mutz, Diana C. (2006): Hearing the Other Side. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Southworth, Michael (1969): The Sonic Environment of Cities. In: Environment and Behavior, 1/1, p.49-70. Schafer, R. Murray (1977): The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf. Waldenfels, B. (1994): Antwortregister. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

In my contribution, I will zoom in to a part of my doctoral thesis from 2021 where I relate boys’ war play to Erin Manning´s philosophy of movement. Manning (2021) states that individuals not only experience the world through perception, but by perceiving the world it is drawn into human experience. Rather than as something stable with an inner and outer zone, she describes perception as a field of relationships in a world full of dynamic processes where “forces take form”. The virtual momentum in the formation of a movement, arises already before we begin to move. A body perceives through a change in the environment that evokes sensual events. An inner movement becomes an outer movement in a folding, bridging between them. This intensive interplay between world and body never stops and there is no beginning or end to movement. Instead of a body/world idea, she describes movement as one with the world – as a body-world.

Manning, E. (2012). Relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy. MIT press. Theorell, E. (2021). Force, form, transformations: on kinesthetic musicality and body worlding in boy´s war play. Doctoral thesis, University of Stockholm.

In Sweden, as in many other countries in the world, there has been a massive shift in (higher) education towards distance education and online teaching. In the midst of this, some universities introduce and use telepresence robots. A telepresence robot provides a virtual presence – or a bodiless presence – to, for example, a remote student who cannot physically attend the classroom. The overall aim of this paper is to explore dimensions of corporeality and hyperreality in digitalized education. More specifically, the focus will be on the research question - how can embodiment and presence be understood when the students are situated, and their participation are mediated, through telepresence robots? The philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see e.g. 1968, 1996) and Martin Heidegger (see e.g. 2001) will be used to analyze the complexity of corporeality and hyperreality in digitalized education. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the lived body supports the analysis of the bodily presence in the room, whereas the Heideggerian ideas and concepts provide entries for an ontological understanding of the relational and spatio-temporal aspects of ‘Being-one’s-Self’ and what ‘Being-there’-with as well as the ‘Being-there’-with-of-Others might mean to students in digitized education.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968): The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996): Phenomenology of Perception. Motilal Banarsidass Publisher. Heidegger, M. (2001): Heidegger Studies. Duncker & Humblot GmbH.

This symposium paper had to be withdrawn.

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This paper intends to entangle the concepts of life line and immersive cartography from a performative research paradigm with the aim to create new knowledge in a research project about how university students learn [anonymised].

Life lines, also called life maps (Worth, 2011), graphic life map (Kesby 2000; Kesby et al. 2005), life-line (Brott, 2001) or timeline (Adriansen, 2012) are considered a methodological strategy to generate biographical evidence through visual representations. Focusing on their formal sense, Frank Guerra Reyes (2019) defines them as "a diagram that shows events that have occurred throughout the biographical history of a human being" (p. 24). This implies that lifelines collect events, occurrences, situations, experiences or feelings of a person in chronological order, and may include, subsequently or simultaneously, interpretations of the events described (Gramling and Carr, 2004). In this sense, lifelines are considered a suitable tool to strengthen the analysis of subjective experiences (Guzmán-Benavente et al. 2022). All of the above links the lifelines to the social sciences' aim of "understanding social phenomena from the actors' own perspective" (Guzmán-Benavente et al., 2022, p. 2), for which it is necessary to inquire into the ways in which they experience the world. The lifelines strategy contributes to this by favouring the narration and analysis of subjective experiences.

This reporting takes place through the graphic re-enactment and accompanying conversations carried out by university students in the context of the research project [anonymised]. [anonymised]’s onto-epistemological approach is grounded on a relational and performative ethic (Geerts and Carstens, 2019). This position implies considering the "Other" as a 'being in becoming' who is a bearer of knowledge and experiences. In the research, participants can show themselves as becoming subjects in their relationships with learning and knowledge.

In some moments of the research, lifelines connected us with cartography. In recent decades, there has been an increasing interest to work with cartographies in research (e.g. Ruitenberg, 2007; Semetsky, 2013; Ulmer and Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). We understand cartography as research spaces (Hernández-Hernández et al., 2018), a place in which ‘cartographers’ take decisions (Onsès, 2014), a non-neutral territory that creates reality in the same act of cartographing. Cartography challenges us, invites us to think differently about learning and allows us to investigate the multiplicity of worlds intra-acting in a certain encounter to create new knowledge (Onsès-Segarra et al., 2020). In this line, Rousell (2021) introduces the concept of immersive cartography, in which “the qualitative is associated with transversal and transindividual movements of experience within an ecology of immanent forces and felt relations, rather than with any bounded entity” (p. xxviii).

This way to understand cartography in research has many points in common with the performative research paradigm. Trying to entangle post qualitative inquiry and artistic research, according to Ostern et al. (2021), this paradigm includes the following perspectives: “Research is understood as creation . . . The researcher is de-centered and in-becoming throughout the research process . . . The research can be produced, analysed and presented in and through several different modes and materialities for creation” (p.2). In a way that in this paradigm research is understood as “an entangled relation between researcher, researcher phenomenon and the world” (Ostern et al., 2021, p. 7), reality is not represented in research, but created (Ostern et al., 2021). Taking into account all this, we look for different ways to approach the lifelines students produced during the [anonymised] project. For this paper, we focus on an experimental analysis based on creating an immersive cartography of lifelines and sharing which ‘new knowledge’ was created.

Context
There is a need to think about youth art work in rural areas. Youth work organisations that focus on arts education are mostly absent in rural contexts, and are concentrated in urban areas instead. In this paper, we will address this by presenting a new “research in practice” project, funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ programme, in which various youth work organisations are investigating the value of ethnographic documentary making as a creative tool for bringing rural youth art work in the spotlight. We are working together with several other organisations in Europe. These are three organisations that work with youngsters: Limerick Youth Service in Ireland, Asociatia Curba de Cultură in Romania, Theaterhuis Mals Vlees in Belgium. Lastly, the umbrella organisation ECYC (European Confederation of Youth Clubs) is contributing to the dissemination of the project once the first documentaries are ready. Currently, we are in the first of two years of the project, which we have named Rural Youth Cinema.

Rationale
Whereas the use and value of other ethnographic methods in arts education and youth work (such as ethno-fictive writing, or using drawing as an ethnographic method) have been well established in academic literature, ethnographic video documentary has received relatively little academic attention so far. After all, it has only been in recent years that video making has become so accessible and widely available, especially to younger populations. With smartphone cameras getting increasingly more advanced with each year, and video platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok still on the rise, many youngsters have already been in contact with video content, both as consumers and creators. While in previous years, documentary making was not a financially feasible medium to work with in most youth clubs, nowadays the youngsters themselves already come fully equipped.

Goals and research questions
The aim of the Erasmus+ project Rural Youth Cinema is to scrutinise audio-visual, ethnographic documentation as a means of highlighting the importance of arts education and youth work in rural regions, and moreover to explore its potential as a flexible and open creative outlet that is empowering for youngsters in all kinds of populations. To that end, together with the various partners throughout Europe, we are developing a qualitative methodology that guides young people in making ethnographic documentaries. Although several guides for documentary making that are aimed at youngsters certainly exist, these are usually only focussed on technical elements, such as camera settings, use of artificial light, camera angles and editing techniques. While these are important aspects which, when learned, can boost artistic expression, it is our goal to also study the educative and communicative effects of documentary making with youngsters. What does it mean to make documentaries with young, sometimes disadvantaged, people? How can documentary making promote and contribute to other arts education youth work activities? And above all, how can these documentaries be used to open up debates about the significance and sustainability of rural youth work and arts education?

Literacy is fundamental to human development as it enables people to live full and meaningful lives and contribute to their communities and society. Literacy is also essential for learning, as much of our learning is mediated through texts and writing is a key medium for communication. Furthermore, nearly all job postings indicate a need for writing skills in job descriptions, for example “excellent written communication skills” under preferred requirements (Messum et al., 2016). However, around 70 million Europeans lack adequate reading and writing skills (European Skills Agenda, 2020). A recent report from the World Literacy Foundation (2022) shows that literacy difficulties cost the global economy 1.1 trillion euros in 2015.

Creative writing can both rehearse young people’s existing writing and literacy skills and inspire them to develop those skills. There is a consistent positive association between writing skills and academic performance (e.g., Bangert-Drowns, Hurley, & Wilkinson, 2004). Moreover, “professional and academic success in all disciplines depends, at least in part, upon writing skills” (Cho & Schunn, 2007, p.409). However, by age 11 years, around 20% of pupils do not perform at expected levels for their age group in writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation (Department for Education, 2018). More alarmingly, only 50% of young people report enjoying writing (Clark & Teravainen, 2016).

Therefore, a key question for educators is to understand how we can enhance the development of writing and literacy skills and simultaneously encourage young people to feel more positive and enthusiastic about writing. This paper reports on a trial of an innovative approach, White Water Writers (WWW), that aims to do both things by giving groups of young people the experience of collaboratively writing and publishing a full-length novel. The key contribution of the intervention is that it can achieve this in a week’s concentrated effort. WWW is based on Ryan and Deci’s (2000) Self-Determination Theory (SDT) which posits that humans have an inherent tendency towards growth. Three needs; autonomy, competence and relatedness, must be satisfied to facilitate growth and foster wellbeing, motivation, and positive psychological functioning. This talk will explore the impact that the intervention has on writing and the psychological and broader benefits of the intervention: specifically, the impact that it had on self-efficacy, self-concept and feelings about other group members. It also measures the impact that the project has on academic performance.

Furthermore, WWW has also developed into a novel research method. By giving our participants autonomy over the content of their novels we have been able to use their books to learn more about what they think about different topics. Some of our recent novels have explored what it is to be human, how the pandemic has impacted life, societal inequality and how people cope with the end of the world. As the plots are fully developed by our authors, they allow us to explore their views on these important topics. Therefore, we have developed a novel method to research our authors views on important topics. We have used this research method to explore our authors views on inequality. Therefore, in this talk we will also discuss the themes of these novels.

The aim of this proposal is to share “Articulation” through video. “Articulation” is an animation practice in a collaborative production with pupils. I used video to document and reflect on the challenges of collaborative practice in arts education classes as part of formal school education. Video is used as a documentation process through this practice, which includes the participants as active members in producing memories for research reflections.

”Articulation” is one of the practices developed as a part of my Ph.D. in Arts Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto. This practice has involved middle school students from the 7th to the 9th grade in the cities of Braga and Gaia in Northern Portugal, from 2018 until today, and teachers of Visual Education classes, including myself.

The purpose of the practices developed was to reconfigure school curricula for the duration of one year. Instead of keep doing Visual Education classes based on short-term exercises or small projects that test pupil skills and technical abilities in visual arts, I intended to deal with the curricula collaboratively, on a short-film animation production with students. With these practices, we wanted to deviate from the positive and predictable rhetorical effects and learnings of their curricula (Gatzambide-Fernandez, 2013, p.215). We based our practice on the uncertainties of the learnings and the artistic ‘doings’. Instead of respecting the need to complete the project, we assumed that we need to value the artistic learning processes of the students. We managed the tasks collaboratively. We purposely did not establish a rigid schedule of tasks, taking the risk of not finishing the animated shorts in time. We did not correspond with a perfect articulation of this project with the school curriculum themes, nor with the illusion that all students must learn to perform the same tasks.

As Baldacchino stated, learning “(…) cannot entertain an end-objective (…)” or “(…)entertain an accumulation of knowns achieved through a process that eliminates the unknowns.” (Baldacchino, 2019, p.43) The intention was to experience gestures of artistic education that aim to be collective (Bishop, 2012, p-93-99) and resist instrumentalized practices (Baldacchino,2019, p.x), segmentary and sedimented subjects as well as the exclusive individualism approach to the student’s technical and personal skills which is currently present in the process of educating arts in Portugal in mass formal education (Martins, 2011, p.235-237). In contrast, I aimed to activate practices ”that understand the impact of learning, beyond the institution .” as Jake Watts (2018) proposes. As part of my research, this video reflection mobilizes the challenges of constituting a participatory practice in schools beyond the interactive and the active /passive binary of participation (Bishop, 2012, p.93); based on my diary reflections on that matter (Carmo, 2022). Through these moving image records, I discuss the tensions and conflicts that such collaborative practice poses to elitist and a technocratic way of teaching, doing, and thinking about arts and arts education practices. I have been bringing to the reflection of this research the diversity of doing and thinking the artistic, in a transdisciplinary way, and thinking about the importance of relativizing what it is to be artistic, and what is artistic doing to young students. As my theoretical concepts, I have been searching to develop and questioning the ephemeral, the invisible learnings, the sensitivities that a scale cannot measure or an evaluation grid (Ranciére, 2010), the impact and the differentiation of long-term projects in the pupils’ life (Mörsch, 2009), the unpredictable (Watts, 2014) and the risks, within a school system over bureaucratic, and over planned by the institutionalization of the art education. (Baldacchino, 2019, p.13)