Conference Agenda

The search and selection of research literature are fundamental aspects of academic work, with researchers being experts in finding necessary studies, ranging from short lookup through exploratory searches to systematic literature reviews. Systematic reviews and other forms of research synthesis have drawn attention to the need for transparent approaches to research, directing focus towards infrastructures supporting research. There is a variety of literature databases of heterogenious quality, different publication types, and inclusion of publications in different languages. Many literature services are not explicit about the scope of their databases. Educational research often requires a transdisciplinary knowledge base, dispersed across multiple platforms. However, the choice of literature databases for a search influences the results (Wanyama et al., 2022; Heck et al., 2023).

To navigate the search process effectively, a combination of knowledge about different databases, retrieval methods, and search strategies is essential. Since there is no universal solution in information seeking, the selection of databases, search engines, and academic social networks remains an individual decision tied to research objectives.

The workshop will provide an overview of existing literature services, considering the publishing norms in educational science and focusing on specialized databases in the field, along with their advantages and disadvantages regarding media coverage, access methods, and disciplinary focus. Next, the workshop will encourage discussions allowing participants to exchange their experiences regarding bibliographic work in educational research and within national contexts.

The objectives of the workshop are:

• To raise awareness among participants regarding various paths and methods in bibliographic searches, outlining the pros and cons of selected literature services and search strategies.

• To foster discussion on experiences and needs.

In April 2023, a new edition of the prestigious theatre festival Theatertreffen der Jugend opened in Berlin. Seven youth theatre productions invited from various regions of Germany were presented to an international audience of theatre practitioners and experts – the topics ranged from feminism and far-right populism to sustainability (Berliner Festspiele, 2023). Within this, almost every theatre production dealt in some way with social transformation processes through and with digital media technologies. Thus, a trend became apparent that can currently be observed throughout the entire European theatre landscape: 'The digital' is finding its way into theatre (Leeker et al., 2017).

However, it is not self-evident what is understood as 'the digital' in theatre. While some discourse positions understand 'the digital' as playing with technologies on stage, others locate it, for example, in a certain aesthetic or in the lifeworld of the performers (Traulsen and Büchner, 2022). One reason for this diversity of interpretations is our social condition, which can be understood as postdigital. In this postdigital condition (Jandrić et al., 2023; Macgilchrist, 2021), digital technologies have become an integral part of our everyday lives that an ontological distinction between digital/analogue or online/offline no longer seems meaningful (Ralston, 2023). The growing field of postdigital studies aims to analyse these complex entanglements to understand "human relationships to technologies that we experience, individually and collectively" (Jandrić et al., 2018: 896). Following this, a close look at educational contexts has been initiated recently (Fawns, 2019; Jopling, 2023) which also affected arts education research by asking how digital technologies affect contemporary arts as well as students’ lives and learning (Jörissen, 2020).

Within this discourse, theatre in education seems to be a prolific object of analysis, as it bears "the potential to experience and understand digitalization more comprehensively in the context of aesthetic processes and performances than would be possible with purely cognitive means" (Jörissen and Unterberg, 2019: 8, transl.). Thereby, German school theatre plays a unique role in the European arts education, as it is institutionally established as an almost nationwide school subject with a high degree of student participation regarding creative and thematic codetermination in the production of scenes and performative practices (Kup, 2019).

An analysis of school theatre productions can – according to the basic premise of this paper – reconstruct the meaning-making and self-positioning practices of their young performers concerning the topic of the performance as well as their attitudes and affects towards 'the digital' itself. For this analysis, adopting a sociomaterial perspective appears particularly fruitful, as it, like postdigital theory, posits a fundamental interweaving of digital and non-digital phenomena (Selwyn, 2023). In this way, the perspective decentralises human agency and understands social and technological actions as co-constitutive (Gourlay, 2021).

Accordingly, our paper asks, firstly, how 'the digital' is produced performatively and aesthetically in German school theatre productions at the Theatertreffen der Jugend?; and secondly, which of the performers evaluations and positionings towards the postdigital condition can be reconstructed? In this way, we aim to precisely describe postdigital performance strategies in contemporary youth theatre, to improve the conceptualization of postdigital theatre in education (Büchner and Traulsen, 2021). Furthermore, our paper aims to ascertain knowledge about how young participants in arts education take a stance towards the postdigital condition. Although the empirical investigation of this paper is situated in Germany, the research object and its analysis extend beyond this scope and hold significance for the broader European arts education discussion, as the lived experiences of adolescents and postdigital trends like social media or the datafication of daily life transcend regional and national boundaries.

And, with, through, alongside… In scientific literature, all of these words are used to couple drama and learning science. Moreover, phrases such as “using drama in learning science” are equally represented. In this paper, we argue that the marriage between drama and science learning is most fruitful when both are considered equally important for the process of learning, and neither is utilized to enhance the other but the merging, or meeting point, is a qualitatively new ground. On this ground, we created a term "sciencetheater" (Serbian "naukoteatar") as a theater play/workshop integrating topics from science and art in an immersive space. This paper is therefore an evaluative study in which our main research question is how sciencetheater, as a form, contributes to learning engagement. The play we analyze is titled “Story about the Metamorphosis”¹ about the naturalist Maria Sibilla Merian, and it was performed 18 times with 450 children aged from 4-10 years.

From the content analysis of children's statements, interviews with teachers, and interviews with the authorial team, we draw lessons about the importance of embodied, immersive, and dramatic ways of learning science.

Modes of learning science through drama can take different levels and forms of participation, with the most commonly mentioned being:

- Appreciating drama

- Performing drama

- Making drama (Baskerville et al., 2023).

Sciencetheater is closest to what is here called performing drama but can also be considered as process drama where the learning experience is in focus, and participating in the plot is more important than displaying it (O’Neill, 1995). In this way, children become "spect-actors," engaged creators of the performance that changes their experience and forms their learning and transformation (Boal, 1995). We map the theoretical background of this study in socio-constructivist theory, rooted in Piagetian and Vygotskian traditions. We aim to move towards ‘discourse communities’ that take space for negotiating and sharing meanings (Driver et al., 1994; Dorion, 2009) by being engaged in dialogues with each other, with actors, with space, and scenography.

Moreover ‘embodied cognition theory’ proposes that cognition is “grounded in the body through sensory-motor processes and interactions with the environment as well as the brain” (Stagg, 2020, p. 255). The immersive environment opens up the possibility for children to undertake responsible tasks and share them with experts, shown to increase their engagement and confidence (Bolton, 1995).

The primary objective of the play/workshop was to raise awareness about the contributions of women to science and the challenges they faced throughout history. To make the scientists come alive, students personally “met them” through acting. It was important that the students were transported to the time the performance takes place in order to understand the difference between the scientific methods of then and now. Costumes, video projection, sound, and the rest of the set design aimed to help children immerse themselves in voyaging through the rainforest. The key scientific concept we focused on was the metamorphosis of the caterpillar and its stages. The last part of the performance, embodying Maria Sibylla Merian, aimed to challenge students’ scientific identity. Although some boys felt uncomfortable taking on the role of a woman, most of them surprisingly responded well to this task. With all this, we recognize that sciencetheater supports the dynamic developmental system of a child by nurturing collaborative learning, a sense of community and motivation and competence (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020).

¹The play was created and performed by Jelena Joksimović, Natalija Drakulović, Aleksandra Kojčinović, and Jana Samardžić, with art direction by Sanja Crnjanski, as part of the program at the Center for the Promotion of Science in Belgrade, Serbia.

Play indisputably can have an impact on children's learning and development and teacher's involvement is crucial in supporting children’s play skills (Bodrova & Leong, 2003; Einarsdottir, 2012; Fromberg, 2002; Gmitrova, 2013; Jung, 2013; Lohmander & Samuelsson, 2022; Miller & Almon, 2009; Wood & Attfield, 2005). To appropriately participate in and support children's play, teachers need to have the necessary knowledge and develop their own play skills (Avgitidou, 2022; Loizou &Trawick-Smith, 2022; Trawick-Smith & Loizou, 2022). Specifically, teachers’ involvement in children’s’ play is supported by Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), since their involvement can enhance children’s play (Bodrova,2008). Teachers’ involvement in play can take different forms; such as direct and indirect involvement (e.g. giving children the play theme for direct involvement, and offering role choices for indirect) (Trawick-Smith & Dziurgot, 2010; 2011). Other studies indicate characteristics of teachers’ involvement such as role participation, dialogic interactions of the characters, dramatic tension (Bredikyte & Hakkarainen, 2011).

Drama and specifically improvisation fall within the ZPD (Graue, Whyte &Delaney,2014) and Profession Development Programs (PDPs) that use drama develop teachers’ skills (Lobman,2005). There are common features between drama skills and children’s sociodramatic and imaginative play skills. These include roles, tension in play, scenario, verbal and non-verbal communication, language and use of props. It is evident that drama and play have an undeniable connection (Dunn & Stinson,2012) and research suggests drama as a means to support children’s and teachers’ play skills (Lobman,2005). Teacher’s professional development studies have used drama as a means to support teachers play skills and showed positive outcomes (Lee, Cawthon & Dawson, 2013; Lobman, 2005; Raphael & O’Mara, 2002; Stinson, 2009).

This study is part of a doctoral thesis that examined the development of teachers’ play skills through the implementation of a drama PDP focusing on teachers’ socio-dramatic and imaginary play skills. In this study we respond to the following research questions: 1) Which drama techniques can be employed in designing an educational drama program that supports early childhood teachers' (ECTs) social-dramatic and imaginative play skills? and 2) Which drama techniques do early childhood teachers' (ECTs ) use during their involvement in play and how do these techniques relate to their socio-dramatic and imaginative play skills?

The starting point of this contribution is Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's short film En rachâchant based on the children's story Ah! Ernesto by Marguerite Duras. The film takes a humorous look at the hierarchization of the educational process through the character of Ernesto, who flatly refuses to go to school because he learns there things he does not know. This film is also the center around which Ola Vasiljeva's solo exhibition was formed at Vleeshal in Brussels in 2015. In the exhibition, the film is staged as a "playful attack on a current market logic that dominates all fields of education and dictates that knowledge must be economically rentable"(Vasiljeva 2015). A refusal to learn is associated with the idea of unlearning and a critique of reason and sense in favour of nonsense, fragmentation and forgetfulness. The exhibition 'occupies an anti-educational stage populated by mixed-media works, sculptures and drawings that manipulate motifs related to the subject of disobedience as learning'(ibid).
With this contribution, I want to reflect on this exhibition, and more specifically on contemporary experimental platforms that, under the umbrella of contemporary art and radical pedagogies, seek to offer an alternative response to an 'intellectual bankruptcy and spiritual emptiness of the approved educational institution' (Ibid.). I want to connect with this by distinguishing between a child-centered pedagogy and a thing-centered pedagogy. Instead of seeing Ernesto's refusal to learn what he does not know as a plea to put the child's world at the center, and seeing knowledge acquisition and the school as forms that stand in the way of thinking differently, -a reading that seems obvious at first glance-, I want to indicate that what Ernesto points at is not so much a critique of learning in school as it is a request to radically rethink how we have inherited a one-sided, incomplete concept of it. In this way, I want to use the film to consider how the notion of ‘unlearning’ gives birth to the art of noticing and paying attention.

Stress and performance gained increasing scholarly attention in the context of performing arts, and a significant relationship was found between stress and artistic and academic achievements (Wilson, 2002). Occupational demands – organizational, interpersonal, and intrapersonal, are extremely high among performing artists and impact their well-being and achievements (Willis et al., 2019), while interpersonal demands – complex relationships with peers, colleagues, audiences, and management, are related to maladaptive perfectionism and performance anxiety (ibid.). Stress can negatively impact, not only well-being but cognitive and motor skills (Beilock & Carr, 2001), highly relevant with performing artists, often experience stage fright, which can negatively affect the physical and emotional components of performance (Steptoe et al., 1995).

Performing arts is a physically and mentally demanding discipline, with stressors ranging from competition pressure to heavy rehearsals to the fear of injury (Bartel & Thomson, 2021; Kenny, 2011; Vervainioti & Alexopoulos, 2015). Performing artists portray a wide range of potentially overwhelming emotions, that might also contribute to heightened stress (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). Moreover, due to the public nature of performance settings, performing artists are vulnerable to external criticism, and a perceived lack of effort recognition can be related to lower satisfaction (Smith, 1989).

For performing arts students, the demands of rehearsals, performances, and academic deadlines can create a complex environment where stressors add up negatively affecting academic performance (Kenny, 2011) and mental health (Clegg & Clements, 2022; Kausar & Ahmad, 2021). The pressure to excel in both artistic and academic domains contributes to heightened stress levels, potentially impacting subjective well-being and cognitive processes essential for academic success.

However, stress and well-being are not the sole impactors on academic and artistic achievements, and studies pointed to other factors like self-efficacy, grit, and help-seeking orientation (Harpaz et al., 2023), often explored separately and among non-artistic population. The present study extends Harpaz et al.'s model in two respects: (1) theoretically, by adding the concept of perceived stress to the model and, (2) by expanding the generalizability via sampling Hungarian non and performing arts students, exploring both possible cross-cultural differences (original study sampled North American students), and the effect of academic discipline. The current model aims to predict grit and subjective academic success by perceived stress, coping resources, and self‐cultivation characteristics (e.g. self-efficacy, subjective well-being, help-seeking orientation, personal growth, and savoring art).

The main research questions are:

1. Are there any differences between non and preforming art students in predicting subjective academic success by stress, coping resources, and self‐cultivation characteristics?
2. What is the added effect of stress on the model predicting grit and academic success?
3. Are there any cultural differences in the relationships between the model variables among the Hungarian student population (current study) and the previous study’s North American sample (Harpaz et al., 2023)?

The streaming era has introduced more than a plentitude of new cultural content-filled platforms. It introduced new ways of searching, listening, and sharing (Tepper & Hargittai, 2009), and new ways of shaping culture, identity, connections, and socialization while overcoming traditional fostering environments like parental education, peer groups, and communities (Bourdieu, 1996). While music is still highly social and can invigorate gatherings with friends and family, personal consumption has become increasingly dependent on algorithms as shapers of taste (Hesmondhalgh, 2022). In fact, competition between music platforms has shifted from content and affordability to capturing the user by focusing on their emotional needs and preferences to retain their use (Hracs & Webster, 2021). However, media-based socialization occurs, not amid consumption, but rather through online communication and exchange of content (Steigler, 2018), making sharing and taste-influencing an important part of current socialization (Vaizman, 2022).

Also affected by the streaming era, amateur musicianship became entangled with informal distant learning, which was further affected by COVID-19 social distancing. Distance has been bridged by online learning options, including communities of learning experiences and performance (Cayari, 2014, 2015; Waldron 2011, 2013). However, the abundance of “do-it-yourself” options has encouraged social detachment, dependent help-seeking opportunities, and teacher-student relationships neglections – all affecting learning abilities and possibly augmented during COVID-19 (Harpaz & Vaizman, 2023).

Socialization is at the core of learning, especially through engagement with art, via the creation of communities, and by close educational circles from family to educators (Bourdieu, 1996). Music platforms’ algorithms, as well as movie/TV ones, have affected the human influential role on the entertainment and art consumer (Vaizman, 2023). To further assess the effects of the streaming era on socialization, this study focuses on musical relationships – taste fostering as expressed by music mentoring preferences of consumers, and music consumption habits. The relations between those were explored while considering two personal characteristics – open-mindedness and savoring art.

Open-mindedness refers to a person’s mental openness to experience new things, as opposed to being involved in social actions (Soto & John, 2017). Savoring art is how Lee et al. (2021) describe a person’s tendency to appreciate art, to need it, as opposed to consuming or attending artistic events. Introduced during the pandemic, it is well suited for exploring the need for art in times of social distance (characterizing the streaming era) and the need for self-cultivation (Harpaz et al., 2023).

To the best of our knowledge, the relationship between open-mindedness and savoring art and music consumption preferences has not yet been tested. In the present study, we chose to focus on music mentoring preferences (MMP) and music consumption habits (MCH(.

MMP refers to music consumers’ tendency to rely on human vs. algorithmic music mentors, as recommenders of new content, whether passively or actively (Vaizman, 2023). MCH refers to routine conduct around music: private listening, social listening, discussing music, and attending musical events. Based on the literature suggesting that artists are open to experience (Schultz, 2022), and that music students have the tendency to prefer a network of music mentors, while non-music students rely more on algorithmic mentorship (Vaizman, 2023), hypotheses were formed under two dimensions: (1) correlations between music consumption and psychological characteristics, and (2) differences between amateur musicians and non-musicians regarding the tested variables.

1) A positive correlation exists between both open-mindedness and savoring art, and MCH.

2) A positive correlation exists between both open-mindedness and savoring art, and MMP, excluding Algorithmic Passive preference.

3) Amateur musicians would score higher than non-musicians on both open-mindedness and savoring art.

4) Amateur musicians would score higher than non-musicians on MCH and MMP.

What happens when we take historiographical research and engage in a collaborative arts-based proposal?

This was the ignite for exploring how can historiographical knowledge and document-based research be explored within a historiography of educational ecologies (HEC) – a trend that defends an intertwined timespan of present and past, and is concerned with spatial relations, within an interdisciplinary, collaborative, artistic, cartographical, and narrative approach (HEC, 2021). Also, in search for ways of knowledge building, HECological thinking forged the ecologies of thinking within the visuals by experimenting with Benjamin’s Archades. Mosaïque technique in particular (HEC, 2022) showed awareness of how non-humans may interplay with the conceptualization of the very same research objects.

In this context, having previously developed workshops with people from different areas of expertise – thus stressing “training and scholarship” as layer of power(s), or better said, “a form of gravity” (Bryant, 2013, p.13) – we have grasped to use HECological guidelines to develop them yet further as art educators and other teaching and training environments. This brough and additional awareness of the agency of the non-human (withdrawn to ensure anonymity).

At the same time, “to enunciate new assemblages of existence”, in different study groups can imply “collective assemblages of human-nonhuman that 'assemble' to form spaces and modes of being that subvert capitalist trajectories of destruction” (Greenhalgh-Spencer, 2014 , p. 324) and other modalities of power. It is from this potentiality that we seek to situate this proposal, which focuses on participatory, artistic, historical and ecological processes as lines of force that converge to make visible the utterance of a human-piano in movement, lived in the past and updated in the present from the agency of its objects.

- our main human actor ? - The Portuguese pianist and composer José Vianna da Motta was born in the African island of São Tomé (1868), and based in Berlin with a royal Grant since he was 13 years old (1882) up to the 1^st World War (1914). Then he had to move to Switzerland and finally returned to Portugal, where he stayed most of the time up to his death in 1948, seamed the perfect case-study to explore other possibilities hybridizing the history of the arts and the education within a HEC approach, especially if focusing on the potential to frame a cartographic experiment (Hernández et al., 2018). In fact, in between, first as a young student that was ‘adopted’ by a German family and the protégée of several important teachers, he was constantly travelling around Germany; and as an adult that was a professional concerto player and major professor all over the world, he travelled regularly inside Germany, Europe, but also Asia and all the American Continent. n a basis of ecologies of existence. Most of these displacements, travels, study trips, vacations, etc., as possible ecologies of existence can also underline the need to further develop this concept: VM desires to settle – Berlin, Weimar, Frankfurt, Genève, Lisbon – but travels almost all his life; and in Benjamin’s view, “one can only get to know a place after having experimented with it in every possible dimension” (1926/2022, p.106)

By focusing on cartography and inviting the participants to engage in a collaborative experience of moving through time and space as fluid categories we stress the HEC guidelines in order to accommodate the participatory and transdisciplinary. In our research questions we wonder:

How can participatory and artistic processes allow for JVM’s cartography as processes of knowledge-building within a HEC perspective?

How does this process allow for the problematization of (inter)connection, simultaneity and void of JVM’s cartography of existence?

In teacher education we have many practices building on stories. Learning from each other’s stories in teacher educators’ professional learning is not only very common, but also a preferred way of learning (Czerniawski et al., 2017; MacPhail et al., 2019). And we tell our stories everywhere, all from the line in front of the coffee machine to the international conferences we visit. We inquire and discuss our own stories and one another’s, while we reflect on the choices made (Jordan et al., 2022; Ping et al., 2018). Less discussed is what more-than-human relationality does/produces in these stories on professional learning. Teacher educators’ stories can involve both human (e.g. colleagues and students) and non-human (e.g. space, teaching materials, books), but that the material and people’s relationships to the material as agents have received little attention. Haraway (2016, p. 97) inspires about thinking more-than-human relationality and decentring the human, in both telling and listening to stories, when she describes that “human and not … in all our bumptious diversity …relate, know, think, world and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings and yearnings. …Other words for this might be materialism, …ecology, sympoiesis, …situated knowledges …”. This inspiration frames our listening to more-than-human relationality in teacher educators’ stories.

In this study, we zoom in on stories on experiencing collaborative professional learning from twelve teacher educators in a Nordic context. We attentively listened to their stories during workshops on professional learning with an aesthetic approach, and during interviews about the teacher educators’ individual experiences with professional learning through their careers. This study explores the collaborative practice of teacher educators’ professional learning with an aesthetic approach. More specific how an affirmative notion of critique in this exploration can contribute to new insights in what an aesthetic approach sets in motion and opens for in new practices of becoming-professional. Teacher educators’ professional learning is in this study addressed as becoming-professional in order to emphasize the continuity and performativity of the process of professional learning (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1988).

In this article we will situate the stories outlined above in new materialist and affirmative critical perspectives. By tracing more-than-human relational tensions in the stories and look further to see how this opens for in new practices of becoming-professional in different directions. This leads to our research question: To what variation of directions can more-than-human relational tensions in teacher educators’ experiences with professional learning with an aesthetic approach lead.

To look more deeply at what is happening in the more-than-human relationality in the stories the teacher educators tell, we engage with Donna Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis, which she in ‘Staying with the trouble’ describes as “a simple word; it means “making-with” … a proper word to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems” (Haraway, 2016, p. 58). We see making-with as a rudimentary process in how telling about experiences become stories with all more-than human present. From a new materialism, with a “relational ontology and ongoing process in which matter and meaning are co-constituted” (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017, p. 65), perspective we use the argument that we know nothing of the stories until we know what the agents in the stories can do (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010, p. 169). Tensions in the perspective of more-than-human relationality come from different angles in the analysis, both from the teacher educator, the material, and the researchers. With an affirmative critical perspective all these angles might “affirm, support and encourage something” in the tensions which will open up for exploration of a variety of new practices of becoming-professional (Raffnsøe et al., 2022, p. 196).

Historical background and theoretical framework: Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a change in the perception of art in the religious education system in Israel. After many years of suspicion and being closed towards the term art in Orthodox schools for reasons stemming from conservatism, religious art teachers began to pave their way and establish art classes in girls' schools. The change began as a grassroots movement of individual pioneering women who, in an autodidactic manner, found a way to acquire the profession because there were no ultra-orthodox schools for studying art. Another reason for the shift is sociological and related to the migration of general art teachers into Orthodox society (secular art teachers becoming orthodox) and bringing new knowledge that was thus far unknown and packaging it in an adapted and accepted form to the conservative society. Another reason is related to the technological and media revolution that has penetrated closed societies, and brought about a change in consciousness that has slowly permeated them and brought new ideas. And lastly, there has been a change in the attitude of the education system towards marginalized groups and there is a willingness to allow them to study art in a way that does not contradict their ideological values though certain adjustments (excluding nudity and subject matters relating to other religions, for example).

In one way or another, these art teachers are exceptions among the teaching staff and in the communities to which they belong, communities which glorifies the collective over individualism. Due to the fact that the art education programs are based on postmodern concepts that are contrary to the view of the schools where they teach, and the fact that there is no body that groups them together or recognizes their uniqueness and difficulties and provides them with tailored training, the art teachers find themselves standing in the middle between, on the one hand, loyalty to the values and the schools and representing the establishment, and on the other hand, the creative spirit that brought them to the pioneering path. This contradiction inevitably produces conflicts that take them out of their comfort zone and they have to deal with them alone.

The paper will deal with the conflicts and difficulties these teachers face in teaching modern and post-modern art in conservative educational institutions, and will examine the coping practices and apologetic tactics they have adapted to mediate the issue to their community. It will examine the desire to synthesize the Jewish sources and the art world in order to give validation and the acceptance of perception for their actions, as well as look at the long self-guided journey they must travel to acquire knowledge and the frustration they feel when they realize that there are no institutions that they can attend to acquire knowledge in an optimal manner.

“Every child chooses their own instrument” is an oft-repeated mantra held high by parents and teachers in music schools as the desire for an instrument selection based on intrinsic motivation, rather than external determinants. Research over the years point, however, to a myriad of actors that influence the child’s decision-making when it comes to choosing to learn to play a musical instrument, including strong visible actors such as the parents and peers, but also more fluid, invisible influences such as the gender stereotyping of instruments, socio-cultural dynamics and economic conditions. What at times appears to be intrinsic motivation, could in reality be an unintentional answer to these broader social dispositions. This raises the question how can we approach the support and guidance for the choice of instrument? Is there such a thing as intrinsic motivation? And if so, how could we reach it?

In this study, we set out to study the current practice of instrument choice guidance for children aged 6-8 in music schools across Flanders and investigate the potential of an guiding orientation tool for children and their parents. This is part of a research project funded by the Flemish government in which the feasibility of an orientation tool for arts schools (visual arts, music, theatre, dance) to increase admission and guide children in their decisions within all the domains. The second phase of this project focuses on the domain of the music schools in particular, as a study from the Flemish inspectorate of education identified a potential threat for the diversity of instruments at music schools. Music schools throughout Flanders have indicated that among children, the distribution of instrument choices is shifting with increasingly many children choosing to play piano over other instruments. For this feasibility study, the Flemish department of education and training formulated several research questions that stand at the basis for gaining an understanding of how the guidance in instrument choice should be organised: how can we measure cultural interests, enjoyment and motivation? Which tools can be used to measure physical and psychomotor dispositions? Who would be the main target group within the guidance of instrument choice? And what are the potential risks and pedagogical implications of this guidance?

At the onset, we identified several conditions that whichever form of guidance to be developed should submit to: 1) it ought to take into account the diversity of our population and address also children from demographics that historically participate less in music education 2) it ought to imbedded within the local practice and 3) it should avoid normative stereotyping.

While this research took place within the Flemish context of music education, which has its own specific embedment within the Flemish society, we believe the results of our study to be relevant in an international context too, as it touches on the agency of the child and the network of actors that affect their decision, as well as on the pedagogics of music education for young children and the learning of instrument playing.

In this paper, I explore how pupils, aged 13-16, experience historical objects during an educational visit to a history museum, and how this experience affects their historical consciousness. Historical consciousness denotes the understanding of coherence between the past, present, and future – how humans are created by and creating history (Jensen, 2017).

As an applicable pedagogical term, historical consciousness has been widely discussed and criticised for its intangibility (Binderup et al., 2014). Historical consciousness is developed through learning processes affected by the culture one lives in, and therefore culture and history are understood as entwined (Jensen, 2017). Historical consciousness is therefore researched in this paper as a broad cultural process that happens ubiquitously, especially at a history museum.

This is why I choose to investigate how historical consciousness as an applicable pedagogical term and a cultural process, can become more tangible when pupils experience historical objects at a history museum. This stems from historical objects being a favourable way to be in bodily and tactile contact with the past, by providing a bodily presence (Dudley, 2012; Gumbrecht, 2004). Furthermore, museum education can be an advantageous pedagogical approach to create such an opportunity for pupils to be in contact with the past through historical objects. The question is how the connection to the past through objects, can encourage pupils to reflect on their cultural understanding concerning the past, present, and future?

To research how a historical object can affect pupils’ historical consciousness; it is essential to further investigate the relation between subject and object. This means that instead of understanding the physical world around us as a resource to fulfil one’s own needs, as many do in our Anthropocene world, I centralize the relation between subject and object (Chakrabarty, 2009). To do this the relation between subject and object needs to be realized as entangled. In other words, an interaction with one another. This entails a shift of focus to the entangled production of the pupil’s subjectivities as affected by and affecting its surroundings/world. Yet the pupil’s subjectivities and life are messy and complex and should be acknowledged and embraced, instead of attending to claims of the authentic pupil (Spyrou, 2018).

Within this study the focus on entangled production of pupil’s subjectivities, are the pupil’s experience with the historical objects and how that affects the pupil’s historical consciousness. Considering the entangled production of historical consciousness, I argue that a more material perspective on historical consciousness would entail that the pupils’ experiences with the historical objects – the material past – would support the development of their historical consciousness. This will lead to a more tangible applicable pedagogical understanding of historical consciousness, which the term has previously been criticized for not being (Haas, 2022). However, using the material past to understand the present and future, is not to establish history as magistrae vitae. Instead, it is an understanding of and openness towards a perspective on bildung with a temporal aspect which takes the relational encounters with the material world into account.

To research historical consciousness as a more tangible applicable pedagogical understanding, I find it essential that it is the pupil’s experience and voice which is the guidelines to this development. Even though I find an ethical obligation to represent the pupil’s voices, I do not consider this study as giving the pupils a voice. Instead, I understand that with the choice of methods in the study, it can give space to the pupils’ voices. I, therefore, acknowledge the limits of pupils’ voices and recognize the importance of the performative character it may hold (Spyrou, 2018).

In our work we bring arts-based research and post qualitative history pedagogies to the museum space. In this presentation we will discuss the generative affective entanglements and the encounters of learning about and researching the vital matter of foundling home collections. We consider the ethico-onto-epistemological challenges (Barad, 2003, Geertz & Carsten, 2019) and the contestations of memory, positionality, responsibility, affect, and representation. Such contestations and entanglements offer an entry point into historical thinking, how historical knowledge can be constructed and can evolve, and how such engagement with material culture in a museum at the embodied level can produce a powerful educative experience for the museum visitor.

In particular, we work at two museums, the London Foundling Hospital Museum and the Museo Degli Innocenti in Florence. We look closely at their token and fabric swatch collections. We consider how connection over time casts a legacy of affective entanglements for researchers and visitors (Clark & Nye, 2023). We have developed a visitor/researcher/maker practice whereby we draw on the practices and methods of traditional histories, museology, and arts-based research to engage creatively with the archive.

This work relies on an openness to plugging in as a ‘production of the new: the assemblage in formation’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, 2). Through art-based research and thinking with theoretical ideas we reconfigure the traces of the past, the stories, the colours, and material remains. The legacies of the foundling hospital have been visited and revisited in multiple disciplinary contexts by numerous scholars and artists. We have seen sculpture, paintings, videos, stories, and images produced through museum fellowships and curations. Our own visitations come through (and with) theory, textiles, and talk. This engagement allows us to navigate creative and experimental pathways to delve into the world of the surrendered child and we also, as Carol Taylor suggests, afford different approaches to knowledge-making which is open, affirmative, political and joyous (2021, 39)

In this paper we bring together an interdisciplinary story of love and loss that is revitalised and reanimated through creative responses (Taylor, 2003; Phillips-Hutton, 2018). We ask: how might we re-imagine child surrender using pencil, cloth and thread that takes our level of awareness and affective engagement with the archive to a new level? How might our initial encounters with foundling tokens be explored, understood and reconstituted through the experience of visitor/researcher/maker to take the story of child surrender to a new place of contemporary significance and consideration? Ultimately, how might our making of children’s garments that resonate with the material residue of the foundlings allow us to generate new knowledge and reveal the educative value of encounter and entanglement in museums? In this (re)-dressing of the children, how do we educate ourselves and others about the past in new ways?

In this paper we present an affective journey as experienced by the museum researcher/visitor/maker on encountering the token collections of two foundling museums, and then, referencing Phillips-Hutton and Pérez-Bustos, create a textile ‘repertoire’ in response to the archive that not only represents our processing of, and engagement with, that archive, but also, in the act of creation, produces new knowledge that can be shared with others.

In the educational domain, digitization has been often conducted in a tension towards techno-solutionism, thus feeding commodification and financialization mechanisms (McLaren, Jandrić 2015, Grimaldi, Ball, Peruzzo 2023). This presentation moves from the assumption, shared by many scholars, that this is just one of the possible unfoldings of digital technologies in education. Here, in fact, they can as well provide numerous spaces for contradictory practices (Rose 2015); enable new ecologies of participation and meaning making (McLaren, Jandrić 2015); and set up a fertile ground to open many different routes for human learning (Hayes 2015).

This study tries then to walk through one of these: specifically, that which encounters art and museum education. If art education calls on us to embark on a path of unlearning (Baldacchino 2019), opposing the positivistic approach and the developmental narrative not seldomly attached to digitization, contemporary museum studies suggest to acknowledge the museum as a potential site for critical pedagogical practices (Mayo 2004, 2013). As research shows, digital technologies, by supporting more open and flexible museum experiences (Hein 1998, Hooper-Greenhill 2007, Tallon, Walker 2008), can help unlock this potentiality, thus triggering a virtuous circle in which the digital museum educational experience rises as an occasion for collaborative knowledge construction and co-production of difference.

Drawing upon such a position, this presentation gathers the initial results of a two-year study, which attempts to explore how art and museum education can be areas from which to envision and enact a different account of educational digitisation. Namely, one that evades from the common normative stance and technocentric approach, and instead centres and shapes around the pedagogies it cherishes. The study consists of three stages: a transdisciplinary literature review, aimed at reassembling a theoretical framework which combines the ideas of different scholarships, such as critical pedagogy and networked learning (McLaren 1995, Jandrić, Boras 2015) with critical museology and art education (Byrne et al. 2018, Irwin 2015); a context analysis, engaging with the selection and exploration of some existing case studies; and a participatory action research, addressed to design a digital museum educational project in collaboration with a group of higher education students. In this presentation I will discuss some findings from the second stage, i.e. context analysis: assuming the intertwining of action and reflection necessary for further transformation, which is inherent in the notion of praxis (Mayo 2004), my aim is to explore a set of case studies that shed further light on the theoretical insights voiced through the literature review.

Context and problematic

In an ‘Age of Uncertainty’ education is challenged to go above and beyond the usual way schools have functioned. This presentation takes us to an exceptional primary school in a peri-urban location in Australia that is carefully paying attention to community knowledge and the experiences of those in the immediate locale who live precarious lives and who are from diverse cultures including Aboriginal. The first and third authors have been researching with the headteacher for over a decade and have witnessed the ways teachers have been finding ways to attend to all kinds of matter, including mud. We focus on an event which we have called ‘Encounters with Mud: Purity and Danger’ in which two parents interact with their baby as part of a Curious Play Activity designed to bring communities members into the school grounds. The Curious Play Activity took place in an Indigenous garden, named the Buggeiri area of the school. This is a quiet place with water holes, native trees, animals, sand, a beehive and wooden seats arranged in a circle. We use the event to explore carnal knowledge, vibrant matter, creative immersion, and cultural resistance with a nod towards Mary Douglas’s (1966/2002) seminal work.

Research question behind the research we will present:
How can materiality appear in the interaction between arts education teaching programmes (level 5-level 7) and arts education research in a university context through collaborative research?

Research-teaching nexus as topic:
Exchange between research departments and education departments is proving to be a challenge for many European universities. In literature the term research-teaching nexus is often used for this interaction.

Within our university, we conduct practical research on how we try to initiate this entanglement. Through an ethnographic methodology, we document and analyse this trajectory.

In existing research, the emphasis here is often on the interaction of individuals (researchers, students, teachers...)or the organization of the curriculum.
Within this presenation, the role of materiality in the research-teaching nexus will be presented.

The following cases will be discussed during the presentation:
-Student materials (educational department) used in the context of ongoing research (research department).
-materials from researchers (research department) used in the context of lessons (educational department).
-Space set up in the context of exchange between the two departments to achieve exchange through lessons, round tables, workshops, debates.
-Materials presented for student, teachers and researchers during shared seminars.

In the university's drawing, they are separate departments. In practice, they are materials, people and practices that are often shared.

Studies show that the research-teaching nexus is a complex concept in which the interpretation of practice and understanding can vary widely in concrete university contexts (Verburg, Elen, Lindblom-Ylänne 2007; Simons, Elen 2007).
The fact that artistic research in the context of European higher education is cause for debate adds to its complexity.
In the presentation, concrete case examples from our university will be discussed. In this way, overviews and classifications will be avoided. However, some concrete cases will speak for themselves.

In arts education research, as opposed to general educational research, the term research-teaching nexus is little to no subject of research.
In the presentation, the concrete cases will be analysed and will be related to existing literature. The cases in which education and research intertwine often have a collective character. This provides opportunities to discuss this etnographic research in a collective setting.

Objective:

The objective of the presentation is to give colleague researchers an insight into how this research was conducted. In addition, concrete materials from the research will prompt debate on the relationship between teaching and research in a university context.

European dimension:

The interaction between teaching and research is an important issue for universities in all corners of Europe. Both research and teaching are considered core tasks of higher education. Especially since the mid-1990s, much has been published on the relationship between the two key tasks (Tight 2016).

Theoretical framework:
-Research-teaching nexus in educational research
For example:
*Verburgh, A., & Elen, J. (2006, December). The influence of discipline and experience on
students’ perception of the relationship between teaching and research. Paper
presented at the annual conference of the Society of Research into Higher
Education, Brighton, UK.
*Maarten Simons & Jan Elen (2007): The ‘research–teaching nexus’ and
‘education through research’: an exploration of ambivalences, Studies in Higher Education, 32:5,
617-631
*Verburgh, A., Elen, J. & Lindblom-Ylänne, S. Investigating the myth of the relationship between teaching and research in higher education: A review of empirical research. Stud Philos Educ 26, 449–465 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9055-1

Materiality in higher education in new materialism research:
For example:
Taylor, C.A. & Bayley, A. 2020. Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research, London: Palgrave Macmillan

European dimension:
For Example:
Tight, M. (2016). Examining the research/teaching nexus. European Journal of Higher Education, 6(4), 293–311.

This article draws on data and research results from an ongoing research and indexing project conducted by the author in close cooperation with the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung in Berlin (BBF). Funded by the DFG - German Research Foundation - (04/2022-03/2025), the project "Thinking Education Across Borders" aims at the indexing, digitization, analysis, and open access provision of a unique and educationally valuable corpus: The international correspondence estate of Wilhelm Rein (1847-1929), the first full professor of education in Germany. As a source corpus, this legacy offers extensive research potential on the developmental dynamics of educational theory and practice worldwide and international educational networks. It also reveals boundaries and synergies in the professional pedagogical milieu, especially between actors in a highly visible academic pedagogical milieu and pedagogical actors who were primarily active in pedagogical fields that were more distant from universities, such as elementary school teachers, or who had a harder time gaining recognition or attention in academic milieus for various reasons (e.g., gender, social or geographic origin). By exploring these contexts, a contribution can be made to generating exemplary insights into dynamics in professional milieus more generally.

One of the research focuses is on the exemplary identification and investigation of different connotations and objectives of the motif of pedagogical reform. (1) From a transcending perspective, the significance of this motif for a professional exchange across (e.g. professional, temporal, socio-cultural and gender) boundaries will be examined. (2) Comparatively, it examines how geographical, economic, political and socio-cultural factors have determined connotations, objectives and practices of pedagogical reform and produced different approaches to reform-oriented pedagogy. (3) Terminologically, the question of interest is whether pedagogical reform always has progressive connotations or whether reformist (theoretical and practical) approaches in pedagogy can also be conservative or regressive.

The motif of pedagogical reform is understood as a fundamental systematic signature of pedagogy (cf. Koerrenz 2014), in the sense that all pedagogy is in itself and always reform pedagogy (cf. Oelkers 2005) and sets itself the task of changing a society experienced as crisis-ridden or imperfect for the better through education or creating the foundations for empowering people to become mature. Thus, all pedagogical theory and practice can be interpreted as a work of hope. By researching the historical connotations and objectives of pedagogical reform and by tracing their interplay in an exemplary manner, the aim is to contribute to making pedagogical reform understandable as a timeless pedagogical motif and to remind us of historical solutions and examples of good pedagogical practice with regard to current social and pedagogical challenges. Insights into the diversity of possible pedagogical reform claims and objectives, into the historical development of such connotations of pedagogical reform, as well as the search for timeless patterns in the interplay of pedagogical and (social) reform claims, can contribute to understanding, critically reflecting on, and questioning current objectives of and claims to education and educational reform. Insights into factors that have enabled and hindered understanding between different actors and groups of actors in historical discourses on the tasks, goals and perspectives of pedagogy can help to shape current pedagogical discourses more effectively, to understand them better and to bring together actors with different objectives on the basis of common pedagogical concerns (e.g. educational justice). Finally, historical findings on pedagogical reform concerns can point to persistent grievances or the need for reform, inspire approaches to solutions or allow critical reflection on whether current theories and practices are falling behind historical developmental progress in pedagogy.

In 1968, after a long process lasting over a decade, the Israeli Ministry of Education adopted the reform in the structure school-system, which was the most comprehensive and expensive reform in the history of the Israeli education system.

Fundamentally, the reform altered the structure of schools, created a new framework for comprehensive middle school following elementary school, and championed educational integration between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The reform was a response to rising social tensions between two groups with distinct identities and social standings – Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews.

The large migration of Mizrahi Jews from Islamic countries and their absorption primarily by Ashkenazi Jews from European countries created persistent social friction and ingrained inequality in the young Israeli state. In 1959, a popular protest erupted in the port city of Haifa, spreading to other towns in Israel. This protest, known as the Wadi Salib events, expressed the social unrest between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, with protest leaders demanding distributive and cultural equality, with one of their central demands being equality in education.

In many ways, the education reform was a policy response by decision-makers to leverage the education system as a tool to reduce gaps and ease social tensions, yet despite starting implementation in the late 1960s, another social protest erupted in 1971 – the Black Panthers movement – making clear to policymakers the urgent need to address socioeconomic unrest.

In my lecture, I will seek to answer whether there was a necessary link between those social protests and the reform policy that created Israeli middle schools and promoted an agenda of educational integration between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. In doing so, I will explain the motivations behind the reform and clarify why the ministers from the Israeli Labor Party spearheading it did not initially aim to change inequality in education but rather to first and foremost prevent social unrest. They adopted models from American, French, Dutch, British and Swedish education and thereby created a reform that transformed the education system – but not necessarily the reality of social inequality.

In closing, I will provide a brief comparative outlook on similar reforms implemented in Western Europe and the United States to understand the historical shift in secondary education in the decades after 1945. The lecture is grounded in the methodology of the political history of education and relies on extensive archival research of primary contemporary sources as well as local and international scholarly literature on education reforms, educational integration, and inequality in education.

During the first years of Lithuania's independence declared in 1990 and the dawn of its new life, unique processes of educational transformation took place. A team of diverse people committed to change was brought together by a strong and charismatic leader, Dr M. Lukšiene. Through the joint efforts of educators, scientists, artists, writers, and others, the Concept of the National School was developed in 1989. The concept introduced a unique vision of education based on liberal and democratic principles, the main task of which was the development of a free personality. Man and society, freedom and responsibility, the nation and the global world were not competing or conflicting concepts but harmonious, interdependent, and interwoven in the vision of the developers of the educational reform. The idea of liberal and democratic education was a core of the educational reform and later became an integral part of other educational documents, including the "Concept of a Good School" (2015). The essential aims of the National School Concept - openness and humanity, freedom and responsibility, respect for the individual, and commitment to the ideals of democracy - remain relevant today and hopefully tomorrow.

The phenomenon of educational reform has been extensively researched. However, the individuals responsible for designing and implementing these reforms have not received adequate attention from researchers. There is a lack of authentic evidence regarding the survival of educational reform, its significance for people's personal and professional lives, its current perspective, and the importance attached to it by reformers in assessing the current educational system and the development of society as a whole. This type of research is deficient not only in Lithuania but also in other European countries that have undergone or are undergoing socio-political transformations aimed at building or sustaining democratic values. The personal experiences hold immense value as historical testimony and provide a better understanding of the path of educational reforms, as well as insights into the future.
This paper analyses retrospective testimonies of individuals who participated in education reform at the beginning of Lithuanian independence, as well as their current reflections and insights into the development of the education system. The analysis examines the phenomenon of educational transformation in terms of its reflection on the reformers' experiences of political and ideological ruptures, the birth of ideas of free education, and the projections of their implementation in practice. By analyzing the different narratives and attitudes of the research participants towards the same phenomenon, the factors determining the unity, directionality, and sustainability of the transformation ideas are revealed.

The research is based on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), which comprises three main ideas. Firstly, humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate through their actions. Secondly, humans create, use, and modify various tools to learn and communicate. Finally, community plays a central role in the process of creating and interpreting meaning, and therefore in all forms of learning, communication, and action. (Foot, 2014, p.3) CHAT is used to discuss the correlation between personal and collective agency, and to reveal the transformative and ecological aspects of agency in our research data.

This paper explores the implementation of and findings from Imagination Agents, a mixed-methods case-study, funded by a Royal Society of Arts Catalyst grant. This took place in an inner-city, Glasgow secondary school, with young people aged 12-13. The approach taken was intended to be ‘grassroots’ in addressing local, environmental degradation and issues relating to young people’s sense of agency. The project was co-created by researchers, parents, artists, artist-researchers, teachers and to a lesser extent, by the young people themselves. The conceptual foundation for the project was grounded in a flexible hypothesis that imagination enables the necessary originality for creativity, enabling learners to construct personal understandings of their own learning which equate to metacognition, with this enabling the self-awareness and confidence for personal and in turn, social/democratic agency. We propose that, life in a posthuman (Braidotti, 2013) world where we are living with a ‘convergent crisis’ of complex issues, necessitates the creation of new understandings, which can be produced through the application of imagination and agency, towards the conceptualisation and facilitation of positive change. Such change is more likely to be sustained if it emerges from and is meaningful within its relevant communities. Supporting learners to develop imagination and understand it metacognitively can result in personal agency which better-equips them as participants within and activators of healthy environments.

While highly regarded in arts education contexts, imagination is often perceived to be some kind of magical force, implying that it is unlearnable and unteachable. Based on Burns’ (2022) models of cognitive/metacognitive imagination and on Atkinson’s (2017) notion of ‘the force of art’ as enabling possibilities for new worlds, we investigated how to support young people’s imagination and agency in relation to their local environment. Artists and researchers, some of whom were also parents of young people within the school, developed conceptual models of imagination (Burns 2022) and agency (Priestly et al. 2015) into highly visual, self-completion ‘handbooks’ which acted as ‘catalytic tools’ (Baumfield et. al., 2009) in simultaneously supporting pedagogy and data production. Pedagogically, they provided an artistic space which complemented artist-led activities to encourage metacognition of imagination and agency. In terms of research, the handbooks enabled the visualisation of participant’s often tacit, reflective understandings of imagination and agency in relation to artist-led activities, allowing researchers to gain process-insights into participant’s developing imaginative, cognitive and metacognitive capacities. The application of the models within axial, visual, evaluation tools, enabled a quantitative reporting of impact which is less-usual in art-based projects and could be considered as a means of measuring imagination. We discuss the potential relevance and ethical implications of this within neoliberal contexts for art education. By combining young people’s self-reports with teacher, artist and researcher journal entries, this paper also reflects on how and to what extent the project was successful in supporting imagination and agency. The authors conclude that there was a positive impact but that this was hindered by multiple challenges inherent within the school environment. We go on to ask whether this school and by extension, others, are currently equipped, philosophically and practically, to support imagination and agency, discussing the implications of this for positive, social and environmental transformation.

First, we would like to consider this action-research in the post-Covid pandemic time, during which relations within or out of schools have suffered (Franck & Haesebaert, 2023) and the climate change time which both stimulate us to think of where we want to land ! (Latour 2017). The specific 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 2023 in the National Support Disposal in charge of experiencing and educators’ formation. Benefitting from last year experience mixing 2 teachers and 5 students, this experiment has been realized with 8 teachers of the French Agricultural Training System and organised in the Institut Agro (Montpellier, Florac campus). This theatre practice was chosen in order to teach AET differenty (out of traditional sessions) and understand the skills development. Its capacity of embodying the AET through artistic sensitive practices (Covez, 2023, 2018) has been shown. But, the French Agricultural Education encounters some difficulties to transform the written AET priority into reality, as this means not only technical but also professional posture changes. This can be observed when the Otherwise Producing Teaching program n°2 is being reconsidered and evolving into what should be a more efficient plan on transitions. Besides, the Institut Agro has recognized the quality of the documentary theatre practice (ecoanxiety and bifurcation decline, empowerment in transformative actions) and expressed the wish to realize it at a national level towards engineers students. We also notice that the higher education school uses the Socio-Ecological Transition as a major concern which enlarges the approach. Therefore, the evolutions showed on both sides encourage us to take into consideration the transition notion as at the centre of concerns, practices and praxis. The European Green Transition skills and knowledge concepts and Sharon Todd thoughts (2016) helps us move on our action-research. It seems important now to question transition itself in relation to education, formation and transformation. Therefore, we refer to her work on the fragility of transition (if related only to a link between past and future) and rather consider it as a process that relies on the present. Finally, when transition, education and transformation seem so much layered, the documentary theatre practice by teachers represents an educational and pedagogical opportunity to experiment in order to question their relationships. A nationwide project has then been proposed and is waiting for subsidiary to study the documentary theatre practices carried out by teachers on a voluntary basis with their students. As Michèle (one of last year’s workshop teachers) has received a regional creativity prize for her students’ performance on textile transition, this encourages us to consider it on a long term in the reality of the agricultural highschools, where the project is spreading.

So: does a documentary theatre practice contribute to teachers’transition? This workshop based on the previous experience is to consider learning it as an emotionally, bodily, individual and collective creating activity put to the service of the understanding and communication of transition. The hypothesis is that it represents a tool for educational change in respect to transition, regarding the educators’ status and professional identity. As, we learnt that the coherent mix way of cognitive and bodily activities brought an improvement in well-being and empowerment, we wish to understand what the impacts of this active pedagogy are, relaunching the arts education value first in aim of teachers. The coherent form that the documentary theatre practice represents, would help teachers

move their personal and professional posture spreading the transition education capabilities within the highschools towards other educators and students.

The earlier low level of scholarly attention on care in higher education (Walker & Gleaves, 2016) has seen a recent rise in the era of uncertainty due to wars, environmental threats and pandemics, as we are re-formulating the concept of knowing and living in the „Anthropocene” (Malone & Young, 2023). In light of the growing diversity among university students in terms of culture, social background, and language, there is a demand for transformative pedagogies (Lopez & Olan, 2018). These pedagogies require educators who establish compassionate relationships, fostering learner well-being. In this respect, we are viewing compassion in a positive light, as it has always been seen by non-Western cultures (White, 2017). This approach aligns with the novel methods in intercultural education (Kawalilak & Lock, 2018; Tongori, 2023) as well as the pedagogy of care. Both emphasize mutual respect and fostering genuine dialogue (Barek, 2023) along with „making kin”, which translates as experimenting within a shared student-teacher environment with a more “symbiotic” relationship (Duraiappah, 2018, p. 1; Malone & Young, 2023). Caring, and being culturally responsive [as well as interculturally competent] as an educator could also be regarded as identical approaches in that teaching builds on ethnically diverse students’ own cultural experiences to avoid inflicting on them a cultural dominance with unfavourable or even debilitating effects (Gay, 2018).

Incorporating the principles of culturally responsive pedagogy and the pedagogy of care, the objective of the activities to be introduced was to create educational spaces where learners feel seen as individuals and cared for, fostering reciprocal care for others. The integration of indispensable 21^st-century digital and AI-powered tools provided avenues for creativity and developing critical thinking. The aim of the presentation is to reflect on the care-based practices proposed.

In addressing the need for transformative pedagogies, the research questions formulated are as follows: Is it possible to achieve the development of student engagement, collaboration, research skills, critical thinking, and creativity through cultural information exchange in a caring environment? Additionally, do care-based, culturally responsive methods contribute to the well-being of the dance university students involved? These questions aim to explore the effectiveness of the implemented pedagogical approaches.

This paper reports on the use of Digital Storytelling (DS) as a mode of pedagogy in a year one Education Studies undergraduate module. Building on Bozalek et al’s (2016) research into how an ethics of care may be used to analyse the dialogic aspects of feedback, we consider how DS, as summative assessment, may foreground care ethics such as ‘attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust’ (826). Our interest in this topic stems from concerns shared by the authors over the impact on staff and students of the massification of higher education, defined as the rapid increase in student enrolment from the end of the twentieth century onwards (Hornsby & Osman, 2014). Although the expansion of higher education (HE) has been broadly welcomed, international research on the massification of HE has noted numerous concerns including changes to the content and delivery of courses that negatively affect course outcomes (Monks & Schmidt, 2011); the diminishment of interaction between staff and students (Wang & Calvano, 2022); a reduction in the variety of teaching and assessment methods (Msiza, Ndhlovu & Raseroka, 2020), and an increase in ‘work-related stress, burnout, and mental health difficulties’ amongst staff (Brewster et al, 2022, 549). Research indicates that overworked staff often provide generic and superficial feedback to students who are ‘fixated on grades’ (Jones et al, 2021, 446) and who sometimes resort to plagiarism ‘to find the shortest and least stressful way to complete their coursework or program requirements’ (Fatima et al, 2020, 35).

Massification presents several challenges to the ethics of care. First, exponents of the ethics of care reject the utilitarian tendency to think of the ‘moral good in terms of acts that produce the greatest good for the greatest number’ (Noddings, 2013, 154). Second, exponents of the ethics of care reject traditional theories about ethics that place justice as the foundation of morality (Gilligan, 1982), arguing instead that care should be the foundation of ethics, with justice as the superstructure (Noddings, 2013). This approach requires us to establish a ‘sensible, receptive, and responsive’ relationship with individuals (Noddings, 2013, 42) rather than ‘abstract away from the concrete situation those elements that allow a formulation of deductive argument’ (42) about the optimal way to interact with them. Under massification, ‘engrossment, or “feeling with”’ (Diller, 2018, 327) students is often difficult for staff, as it is seemingly impossible for a large cohort of students to fill our ‘field of attention’ (327) in the same way that a smaller group might. Arguably, the widespread use of student satisfaction surveys exemplifies the shift towards the formulation of deductive arguments about the optimalisation of staff-student interactions under massification (see for example Winstone et al, 2022). Third, if diligent teaching staff attempt to implement an ethics of care on massified programmes they may compound their ‘work-related stress, burnout, and mental health difficulties’ (Brewster et al, 2022, 549) by going “above and beyond” already unrealistic performance expectations.

Mindful of these concerns, this study asks if DS has the potential to facilitate compassionate enquiry grounded in the ethics of care in the context of a large, international cohort of first year undergraduate students.

In this contribution I try to explore pedagogies that support the creation of a collective imagination of interdependence based on care and solidarity. With the art of coexistence, I mean a collective co-creation of new narratives and values that are based on the interbeing of all life. We are always involved, embedded and in interaction and therefore we need a new understanding of being, knowing and community. These are not moral imperatives but rather a relational understanding of subjectivity that is based on the experience of belonging and being part of this world. An ethic of care starts from the understanding that all beings need care. It is the realization that all life is related and connected (Bozalek, Zembylas & Tronto, 2021; Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2006).

How can we understand the world as relational and entangled instead of focusing on the dominant reductionism of life? I argue that we are currently experiencing a crisis that is characterized by the worldmaking practices of Western modernity that are based on exploitation and separation including modes of knowing and being that cause violence (e.g. Escobar, 2007; Quijano, 2007; Hall, 1992; Mignolo, 2011; Maldonado-Torres, 2008; Zembylas, 2017). The imperial mode of living pervades our institutions and understanding of education. These hierarchical and separating modes of being are not life-sustaining for the world and future generations (Andreotti, 2021; Akomolafe, 2017; Brand & Wissen, 2017). Given the complex social and ecological challenges as well as the uncertainties that we currently face, we need new and varied ways to engage with the world and tap into our collective creativity. Interdependence as a process of reconnecting to self, others and the world, cannot be done just sporadically or on a purely intellectual level. Rather, instead the practice and awareness of the interconnectedness of all life are part of a continuous process of remembering. Such reconnection relies on tapping into the intelligence that lies beyond our thinking minds and includes the wholeness of human experience. I argue that arts-based approaches are crucial to disrupt habitual linear and rational ways and engage with embodied and sensory experiences to open up new ways of seeing, being, doing, and knowing? (Bishop & Etmanski, 2021, p. 133; Adams & Owens, 2021).

The aim of this contribution is to recognize the transformative potential of arts-based approaches as a practice to reimagine, interrupt, insist and resist as we engage collectively to better understand societal issues (Adams & Owens, 2021). I will provide examples, photo voice and zining/collage for perspective change, care and solidarity from a higher education class I facilitated. These approaches were particularly effective at opening up new ways of being, knowing and doing as well as perspective change, realizing plural realities, and multiple systems of knowing and being. Learners move from individual to collective meaning-making and start connecting inner worlds with outer realities. The students created photos on their understanding of peace and showed them to the class, promting various perspectves from the group and afterwards the phototaker provides his/her perspective on it. We live in a century that is full of images, but we do not really see them. To create a caring coexistence, it is crucial to see things from a deeper perspective and with a deeper awareness. Another form to express oneself beyond text is zining. Historically, zines have been a form of expression for marginalized communities to share their stories and organise (French & Curd, 2022). I will give examples from zining as collage work to highlight the possibility to express political thoughts about solidarity with nature via zines.

Context
Too often we think of arts education as solely a medium for self-expression. Within the current dominant field of student-centred education, with a high focus on individual learning paths, there is a risk for arts education to become self-centred and individualistic. In this "research in practice project", we have put a world-centred (rather than student-centred) view on arts education into practice by setting up ethnographic video documentary projects in several youth organisations in various European countries, including Limerick Youth Service in Ireland, Asociatia Curba de Cultură in Romania and Theaterhuis Mals Vlees in Belgium, along with the European Confederation of Youth Clubs and the UCLL, funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ programme under the name of Rural Youth Cinema. During the 2023 edition of ECER in Glasgow, we presented the preliminary results of this project. We are now reaching the end of this project and will present our final results, good practices developed along the way, and our thoughts on the pedagogical and educational consequences of our approach.

Rationale
The decision of focussing on documentary making stemmed from a combination of pedagogical and pragmatic considerations. The medium of film and videomaking is relatively new as an arts educative practice in youth work. It has only been a decade since, particularly among younger generations, the accessibility and widespread availability of video creation increased significantly. Especially in the last few years, the rising popularity of video platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have made video content a prevalent experience for many youngsters, who now engage with it both as consumers and creators. From a pragmatic perspective, it can be effective to tap into this resource and explore this medium that virtually all youngsters already have some familiarity with. Moreover, for youth clubs it can be a low-expense medium as well, as smartphones have become ubiquitous. And yet from a pedagogical perspective, it is especially interesting as a focus on video documentary making is founded on a collaborative basis of co-creation, in which the makers (i.e. the youngsters) are compelled to adopt an outward view, into the world around them. In the act of “recording what is out there”, there is an alluring dynamic of agency between the maker and the medium, in which ephemeral elements and local ecosystems are elevated in favour of self-expression.

Goals and research questions
The goal of this Erasmus+ project, Rural Youth Cinema, is to explore audio-visual, ethnographic documentation as a tool for arts education through a hands-on, collaborative project. The results of this project are twofold: 1) there are the documentaries made in the various countries. These are testaments of the youth work and the local environments in which they were made, but also exemplify the artistic and educational potential of the practice. And 2) we have developed a qualitative methodology to guide youth workers in using ethnographic documentary making in their day-to-day activities. While existing guides focus on the technical tips to work with (smartphone) cameras, in our research we focused on the questions 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 it thrive as an sustainable developing arts educative practice?

In research, it is important to mind the human dimension, that is, not only our thoughts, ideas, and brains, but also our corporeality, our presence, and our affects. Research is done by persons, who usually work in relation to others. So we as researchers are subjects-in-relation. This calls for taking into account the ethics of care. According to Joan Tronto (2009, para. 5),

An ethic of care is an approach to personal, social, moral, and political life that starts from the reality that all human beings need and receive care and give care to others. The care relationships among humans are part of what marks us as human beings.

This means that although being aware that power relations exist in any collaborative work, researchers and participants are responsible for working in a good work environment, by paying attention to one’s and others’ needs, and mind each participant’s experience and reflections (Pettersen, 2011) in order to establish more horizontal and caring relationships. An ethics of care is constructed across the places and spaces and throughout all co-creative processes. This entails an affective response and an ethical response-ability. That is, having the ability to respond (response-ability) to the emotional-social needs in a way that predisposes us to learning in the best possible way for the entire educational community involved.

Taking Haraway's conception of situated and relational knowledge, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) comments that knowing practices require care. Care is relational (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 198). Starting from the ontology of becoming, or an ontology that is made (in the making), Puig de la Bellacasa speaks of becoming-with and thinking-with (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 200). This invites us to move away from a culture of individuality and “seek common reasons for hope in concrete forms of situated “praxis”” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 203). Practicing the pedagogy of care means becoming aware - and responsible - about who we are (in relationship) and how we do things (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). If we think of reality as relational, we enter into ecologies of being and knowing where our actions are constantly affecting not only our reality but a reality that is being co-created by all human and non-human entities that are in a concrete space-time-matterings.

According to Andrew S. Larsen citing Gordon, Benner and Noddings (1996), pedagogies of care “consists of a set of relationship practices that foster mutual recognition and fulfilment, development, growth, protection, empowerment, human community, culture and possibility” (Larsen, 2015, p. 17).

From this theoretical framework, two researchers wanted to explore ways to ‘create community’ in a network of researchers in arts education through approaching politics of care. The question that guided the research was: How to engage pedagogies and ethics of care in a research network?

The aims were:

• to explore to what extent visual and artistic strategies could build a community through care

• experiment in engaging new models of collaboration based on togetherness in arts and education research

• to invent new ways to create supportive environments and networks in arts and education research

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

This research delves into the intricate intertwinements between analytical and affective approaches within the context of arts-integrated poetry education. Several researchers have emphasized the importance of integrating analytical and affective approaches, recognizing them as integral components of literary reading that mutually support each other (e.g., Felski, 2008; Xerri, 2013). Despite the acknowledgment of this symbiotic relationship, there is a notable gap in empirical studies that explore how this integration manifests within a classroom context. Furthermore, researchers point out an ambiguity between text-oriented and reader-oriented literature instruction and the ways in which different frameworks of literary theory influence teachers’ instruction (e.g., Pieper, 2020). Addressing this ambiguity is crucial to exploring alternative approaches to teaching literature that allow students to immerse themselves in literature without abandoning an analytical focus. This necessitates an approach to literature teaching that combines the analytical and the affective, acknowledging both the aesthetics of the literary text and its potential to influence and engage the reader (Felski, 2008).

One pedagogical approach to combining analytical and affective approaches in poetry teaching is arts integration. Serving as a transdisciplinary teaching approach, arts integration provides innovative opportunities for teaching poetry in combination with other art forms, such as dance or photography. The goal is to attain equal emphasis on all included art forms or subjects (e.g., Sanz Camarero et al., 2023). Arts-based approaches to teaching poetry have been scarcely researched in secondary education, and scholars call for more research (see Jusslin & Höglund, 2021). Nevertheless, recent research in primary and secondary education implies that arts integrated literature teaching can have the potential to promote both analytical and affective approaches. Studies have indicated that working with art forms, such as dance and visual art, requires close reading of literary texts and enables the incorporation of students’ voices and experiences in the teaching (Curwood & Cowell, 2011; McCormick, 2011). Given these promising gains, arts integration might provide opportunities to focus simultaneously on analytical and affective approaches in secondary poetry education.

Against this backdrop and a genuine wondering about what happens when the art forms of dance and photography are integrated with poetry teaching, this study aims to explore what this integration produces in terms of the relationship and possible friction between analytical and affective approaches in poetry education—and arts education more broadly. This exploration builds on empirical material of teaching that integrated poetry with dance and photography in upper secondary education in Finland.

The study is theoretically grounded in postfoundational theories, which oppose binaries such as body/mind, human/nonhuman, matter/discourse. As such, postfoundational theories can offer valuable perspectives in exploring what is produced in the intertwinements of analytical and affective approaches during the arts-integrated poetry lessons. In this study, we explore how Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2013) concepts of smooth and striated spaces can offer opportunities to theoretically explore such intertwinements. Whereas an analytical approach to reading poetry can be understood as a striated space, which is bounded and guided by rules, (e.g., literary elements such as imagery and rhythm), an affective approach might signify the open and allowing perspective of a smooth space. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2013) emphasize that these spaces exist only in mixture; a thought that might be productive for envisioning how the analytical and affective approaches to reading poetry might intertwine.

As part of the research project that took place between 2023 and 2024, entitled “[in]visible - [in]visibility of identities in Portuguese 1st grade elementary textbooks of Social & Environmental Studies after 1974”, we questioned the presence of a subliminal discourse inducing discriminatory values in the representations of images in these textbooks. The research focused on identifying these discriminatory contents that disseminate the naturalised values of a culture built in the West, heir to a colonial, patriarchal and racist past.

By analysing the representations of identity in textbooks between 1974 and 2023 and building a critical reading archive based on this research, the project aimed to identify the impact of the information made (in)visible in these books (https://invisible.i2ads.up.pt/).

The purpose of this communication is to question the possibility that images representing identities could be different, in defence of anti-discriminatory values.

Based on a workshop held with students from the Master in Illustration, Edition and Print

[MIEI], in the subject “Illustration Project”, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto [FBAUP] in February 2024, who experienced the possibilities of integrating these values into illustrations, the team proposes to present an analysis of the results of this session, in the context of the research carried out.

The relation between the workshop images and the studied textbooks' pictures will be part of the presentation.

We have turned this question into an essay on alterity in music, on how we can bend the boundaries of the sound we already know, and how we can now project it towards the infinite, the endless sound, and that which is yet to be known.

It's about exposing an uneasy experience of thinking that inhabits and is present in a teacher - musician - researcher, and listener who hears voices that confirm the incompleteness of what he is made of when confronted with the infinity and materiality of sounds.

So here are some fragments of this meditative discourse. Here are the most recent declarations-eruptions of this volcanic activity on his thinking, in which what is most clear is, above all, the emergence of what is said, not so much because of its truth, or even falsity, but much more because of what is said.

falsity, but much more because of his desire for contact and wandering between concepts that project him onto the sonorous face of the Other.

It's important to make it clear that the Other is not a threat, but a challenge, and this must be affirmed.

Early Childhood Education literature considers play as the most appropriate way to plan and promote learning and development. Moreover, we acknowledge the importance of the teacher’s role in children’s play (Loizou, Michaelides & Georgiou, 2019. Vygotsky, 1978) and in enhancing children’s learning focusing on creativity (Leggett,2017). Creative play, as another type of play, connects play with creativity and the arts and provides children with the right context to develop their creativity (Szekely, 2015). The purpose of this study was to show how a creative play program affects children’s creativity focusing on two case studies. Creativity theoretically is defined as an attitude or a habit (Sternberg, 2007) and as a transforming activity for children, which can lead to different ways of acting or thinking (Leggett,2017). Additionally, it is considered as the processes followed by children, such as generating ideas (Robson, 2014), or as the characteristics of the products created, such as originality (Glaveanu, 2011.Weisberg, 2015). In this study we are referring to creative play occurring at play areas in a pre-primary class, as specified by the Early Childhood Education Curriculum of Cyprus (2020). We concur with the definition of creative play ‘as a flow of actions’, where teachers and children ‘in the context of the arts’, participate ‘in the process of creation and creativity’ (Loizou & Loizou, K., 2022, p. 3-4). The research question guiding this study was: How does the implementation of a creative play program impact children’s creativity?