Conference Agenda

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.