This paper aims describe and evaluate an artistic project – Pictógrafos (Marques, 2013), developed with a group of pre-school children and their teacher in Évora. The artist, together with the children engaged in a joint creative process of producing a system of iconographic images creating real “world versions” (Goodman, 1995), able to communicate ways of thinking and feeling their own individuality and their relationships with others. This is a process rooted in the artist experience. Throughout this creative activity, it aims to develop an artistic research as well as to establish a network of links with professional structures of other areas such as pedagogy, art education, aesthetics, art theory and design.

Our theoretical framework combines different theoretical grounds from visual arts, education and learning and art education, which will illuminate some problems identified in this field. 

The productive and artistic use of creativity, it is no longer considered an exclusive of the normatively credited agents; this constitutes a rupture with the art canons  with more than thirthy years (Beuys, 1972). On another side, comtemporary views of pedagogy (Bruner, 1996; Nóvoa et al., 2012) advocate for an integration of productive and epistemologic methodologies of real knowledge production in schools. The possibility for children to engage in a real art production, together with an artist that will act in a specific way, using specific tools and processes characteristic of the artistic creative process is uncommon in children’s school experiences. The teachers are not artists, scientists, mathematicians or philosophers; therefore what they do with their children/pupils are didactic transpositions (Niza, 2006) of knowledge, mainly in a passive and consuming mode aiming to be evaluated.  

The relationship between art and education, despite having sometimes an unstable character throughout history, is in our days substantially theorised.

Menuhin (1998) believed that children's early artistic practices, as well as the possibility of direct contact with artists and their forms of artistic creation, allowing them to discover aspects that constitute an artistic product, provided them with the opportunity to value themselves as individuals, contributing to building a more tolerant world. Ardouin (1997) also defends that access to artistic culture is a question of humanity.

The contributions of Dewey (1958) and Read (1982) on the role that art plays in the educational process, emphasize the affective and personal and direct experience of the child as irreplaceable. To Eisener (1998) it is essential to expose children to a variety of expressive forms encouraging their interaction with other sensitive scales.

The processes provided by the Pictografos project assumed a view of children as citizens, exerting agency in their own development and learning in dialogue with the community members, releasing them from smaller or limited status - either the child as naive, immature, imperfect, or the child as the center of the world, consumer and enclosed at its limiting egocentrism – visions of children in contradiction with a dignified and actual understanding of childhood. Participating in the Pictografos project could at the same time create the basis to a critical understanding of the visual culture (Sardelich, 2006) where children are immersed. 

This project included diferent research questions arising from the diferent aims of the diverse team (pre-school teacher, artist, early years academic and art educationacademic).

This paper our questions are:

-       What are the children, the artist and the teacher’s perspectives of the project?

-       How diferent participants give meaning to the activities and the products in Pictografos?

-       Do children recognise any specific epistemological/methodological difference between  the work developed with the artist and with the teacher?

-       How does the Pictografos project impact on children’s and the teachers’ classroom work?

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