Conference Agenda

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.