Conference Agenda

Teaching is one of the most challenging professions; thus, preschool teachers experience many different things in the workplace due to the nature of their work (Johnson et al., 2005; Davis & Dunn, 2018; Fu et al., 2010; Seaman & Giles, 2021, as cited in Levine Brown et al., 2023). Because early childhood teachers perform emotionally and physically demanding work throughout the day, these educators are dealing with behavioral challenges and resolving conflicts and they are seen as caregivers. They work collaboratively with colleagues and families. Additionally, they manage the emotions of individuals within their organization, including children, administrators, families, and colleagues (Purper et al., 2023). Thus, interactions with children, colleagues, and parents throughout the day can give rise to a variety of emotions (Humphries et al., 2018; Sanders-Smith et al., 2020). Teachers' emotional experiences vary, and their experiences tend to be negative, especially when dealing with adverse situations in the classroom (de Ruiter et al., 2020). Considering the emotional challenges of teachers, the concept of resilience becomes prominent. The term resilience refers to the ability to adapt positively to stress, trauma, and life challenges (Vella & Pai, 2019). The presence of high emotional demands, and the expectation that teachers will constantly be supportive and resolve challenging behaviors, leads them to build good relationships with parents (Vatou et al., 2021; Purper et al., 2023). The expectation that teachers will manage challenging situations in addition to supporting basic skills can be overwhelming for them (Purper et al., 2023). Both individual and contextual factors can contribute to resilience. An optimistic and hopeful character allows for a positive approach to challenges and factors such as a supportive workplace environment and shared vision can enhance a teacher's resilience (Wang et al., 2023; Vatou, 2025). Based on Bronfenbrenner's (1994) “Microsystem” model in Ecological Systems Theory, this research will present how teachers make sense of their emotional challenges and resilience within an art-based research framework. Art-based research is defined as the systematic use of the art process in research, the emergence of different forms of artistic expression, and a way of understanding and examining participants' experiences (McNiff, 2008). In art-based research, aesthetic tools and designs are used to enrich the research process (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Art-based research enables the naming of narratives and the uncovering of teachers' stories related to emotional challenges. Art-based research focuses on the subject and meaning-making by bridging the gap between art-making and verbal narrative (Akimenko, 2018). Thus, this research will investigate how teachers express their emotional challenges and resilience through an art-based research methodology and will focus on their narratives.

Research questions are:

● How do teachers construct art-based narratives and symbolic representations to make sense of emotional challenges in their professional lives?

● How do teachers narrate the experiences of emotional challenges in terms of resilience?

The purpose is to present a reflection on the potential of art education to promote resistance to hate speech and intolerance, problematizing the influence of digital content on interpersonal relationships.

The present text is based on a literature review supporting a pedagogical experience to be carried out in the context of the doctorate in art education.

School violence is a concerning reality and one of great complexity, being a risk factor for students’ physical and mental health, as it implies serious problems of self-esteem, self-confidence and socialization (Santos and Ramos, 2026, pp. 18; 27). It should be a priority commitment of society and school in particular, to implement strategies promoting healthy and citizenship relationships, in activities that foster responsibility, respect and confidence/trust (Rodrigues, 2023, p. XLIII; Santos and Ramos, 2026, p.24).

The digital is part of our daily lives, essential to our social relationships with multiple benefits, it is mostly made of images that until a decade ago reached us mainly through cinema, television and exhibitions. Currently, and at high speed, they come to us through social networks and are consumed without critical criteria (Charréu, 2016 pp.276-277; Mirzoef, 1999 pp. 23-25). Through these images, frequently manipulated, we discover the capacity to transmit messages, contributing to build a world vision, sometimes distorted (Acaso, 2007, p. 11; Acaso and Megías, 2022, pp. 31-32).

In recent years, the significant increase in the use of digital devices by children and adolescents is concerning, the consumption of these contents mostly involves harmful aspects, such as violence. The excess of this use can interfere in the neuronal system influencing the processing of emotional regulation such as social acceptance or rejection, anxiety or depression. The artificial worlds of social networks work as a stimulant, due to the high degree of excitability caused, acting quickly in the centre of emotions, and can produce psychological dependance more easily. Special attention is therefore needed for the negative impacts on the physical and psychosocial health (Choi et. al., 2025, p.1; Cury, 2024, pp.81-82; Desmurget, 2021, pp. 262-265; 290; Tsang et. al.,2023, pp. 1-2).

Project work aims to promote the critical thinking and research, establishing connections between experiences, informations, knowledge and know-how. This modality perspectives different learning possibilities, ways of thinking and power relations, through the bonds created between teachers, students and communities (Hernández and Anguita, 2023, pp.73-75). Teaching critical thinking is not an easy task, there is a tendency towards a more passive posture. Nevertheless, the stimulating thing is that teachers and students may, together and at the same time, share ideas, building, therefore, a learning community (Hooks, 2023, pp.20-21). The concept of disobedience is linked here, since the curriculum is approached differently, challenging established forms of knowledge and also modes of knowing, offering new ways of thinking and acting (Atkinson, 2018, pp. 194-195).

Through collaborative artistic projects, it is intended that theme of violence in school, and the digital influence, may be thought critically by everyone and put into perspective. Converging with the concept of Art Thinking, in which art must align with critical questions and world issues through projects, awakening the curiosity to question everyday topics (Acaso, 2009 pp. 118-119; Acaso and Megías, 2017, p. 29, 68-69). This way, we will be exploring the potential of art education in resisting intolerance and violence, which is part of an increasingly dominant discourse.

This article aims to reflect on how the practices of welcoming a new visual arts teacher in Portuguese public schools promote exclusionary narratives that are naturalised through language. That being said, based on the author's memory of her first teaching placement, the aim is to analyse how, in this first contact that the teacher has with their new professional context, they are presented with a normative discourse regarding their role in the school machinery (Varela & Alves-Uria, 1992), presupposing an adaptation to this place and a nullification of everything that may be foreign to it.

At the beginning of the text, the author shares her firsthand experience as a new visual art teacher in a Portuguese public school, through her memories, recounting the entire ritual involving entering the school building, her introduction at the reception, the office and the management of the public institution, accompanied by a description of the different verbal and physical interactions of the various agents who were part of that moment. This description raises questions about how the teacher is addressed and affected during this ritual, exploring the feeling of strangeness fuelled by the idea of not belonging in that space or feeling ostracised. Based on this questioning of the boundary between the person outside that environment and the agents who are part of it, the concept of stranger is constructed.

The idea of strangeness is conceived from a position between places, which is formalised through a movement from the outside to the inside, that is, a feeling of strangeness empowered by the unfamiliarity of the languages with which the subject is confronted and subsequently materialised in their body, reflecting on their mode of action within the school space. In this case, the stranger becomes the teacher who is external to the school they wish to integrate into and, to this end, begins to naturalise the discourses and practices presented to them in this first moment of contact with the terrain. However, what possibilities emerge from the moment the teacher remains in this place of strangeness, in turn deviating from the normativity imposed by that space?

By considering these possibilities based on the author's experiences, the text draws attention to ways of doing and saying, that is, behaviours, verbal and non- verbal actions, understanding how these languages structure discourses of power that naturalise hegemonic practices among school agents, which reinforce exclusionary and discriminatory discourses within the school environment and systems. These ways of doing and saying are named through the interactions that the author recounts, exploring from these modes the way in which expectations regarding her place as a visual arts teacher are presented to her. These expectations are framed by the ways in which they address her, taking into account her way of acting as a foreign body, which compromises the construction of the figure of the teacher as a representative of the Portuguese state.

After framing how these ways of doing and saying construct a discourse on the figure of the visual arts teacher, a claim is made for strangeness as a form of resistance to the naturalisation and reproduction of practices by visual arts teachers in public schools. This claim defends the need for a constant strangeness of the teaching subject in the school space, as well as their practices and languages, with the aim of constructing a critical action within the school that promotes an inclusive school space of constant learning for all agents involved, through constant questioning of what is considered normal and what is considered strange.

For decades, sociological theory has emphasized a shift toward fluidity and rapid transformation, highlighting the need for forms of thinking, learning, and relating that engage complexity rather than simplistic static essentialism (Bauman, 2011; Morin, 2000). The condition of liquid modernity described by Bauman (2000) situates contemporary education within a social landscape defined by instability, uncertainty, and the erosion of stable reference points. A condition intensified by social acceleration, which compresses time, privileges immediacy, and undermines reflection and sustained engagement (Rosa, 2013). Yet, despite this long-acquired awareness, formal education has changed little: curricula remain standardized (Aoki, 1993, 2005; Apple, 1979; Pinar, 2011; Macintyre Latta, 2013; Osberg & Biesta, 2008), often rigid and impermeable to contextual shifts or emergent conditions, knowledge fragmented (Morin, 2000), relationships hierarchical (Foucault, 1995; Freire, 1970, 1994; hooks, 1994, 2003; McLaren, 2009), and assessment oriented toward control and measurable outcomes. Rather than embracing uncertainty as a constitutive condition of learning, educational systems tend to deny it.

This enduring misalignment between contemporary social conditions and educational practices opens a conceptual fracture. Instead of attempting to resolve this tension by restoring stability or refining existing models, this study proposes to inhabit it, engaging uncertainty as a generative condition for teaching, learning, agency, and communitarian meaning-making. Improvisation is what allows to linger in this fracture. Improvisation is not confined to artistic practice but is understood as a form of knowledge, a relational mode of action, and a political practice that unfolds in real time (Lewis & Piekut, 2016). It involves risk-taking, deep listening, and a willingness to be affected and transformed through interaction (Caines & Heble, 2015). As such, it carries a clear educational and political potential. Contrary to the entrenched tendency of education to prepare students for a “predictable and orderly future,” improvisation in teaching and learning is not occasional but structural, embedded in the very dynamics of engaging with a fast-moving and uncertain present. Knowledge itself grows along a path that is never linear nor entirely foreseeable, but marked by detours, trials, and mistakes (Dewey, 1934). As Ingold (2010) emphasizes, learning does not consist of following fixed instructions but of engaging with others, observing, experimenting, and participating in shared practice, with a capacity to bend and re-invent.

Building on this perspective, the study frames improvisation through the metaphor of Education as Jazz (Santi & Zorzi, 2016). Here, jazz is not considered as a musical genre, but as an educational lens that highlights learning as a creative, relational, and deeply formative process, where improvisation guides engagement, exaptation (Gould & Vrba, 1982), and co-construction of knowledge.

While the role of improvisation in education has already been widely explored across general educational contexts (Aoki, 1993; Cappa & Negro, 2006; Gershon, 2006, 2017; Holdhus et al., 2016; Sorensen, 2022; Santi, 2010; Tomlinson & Germundson, 2007; Zorzi, 2020), this study extends existing studies by approaching improvisation through the lived experiences of jazz musicians and improvisers. Their practices are not treated as models to be transferred, but as situated forms of knowledge capable of illuminating alternative ways of thinking about teaching, learning, and curriculum. Within this framework, the research is guided by the following questions: (RQ1) Are there defining elements of a jazz approach in education, and if so, what are they according to jazz musicians and improvisers? (RQ2) How, and in what ways, can a jazz-inspired educational approach contribute to the development of a curricular framework?