This project starts from a broader interest of thinking what a pedagogical material is or, more significantly, what can it become in the context of an experimental archive. We begin to differentiate a didactic object and a pedagogical one, regarding the first as belonging to the prescriptive field of didactics, and the latter to pedagogy. Mostly used as the qualifier “pedagogic” and “educational”, the pedagogical material remains unsatisfactory for the expectations raised by the experimentalism of the archive, since such adjectivation seems unable to withdraw it from the territory of what’s already known. The project is therefore prompted to investigate a possibility beyond “didactic” and “pedagogical/educational” material to refer to a certain reviewed and reworked materiality constructed by us artists and mediators operating in teacher training and educational services[L1]  at museums and cultural entities.  We are a group of five interveners with different assigned roles in this project of training in arts education. ‘De Lápis na Mão’ is a medium-term training directed at teachers of young children [L2] where pedagogical and didactic objects and strategies are constantly at stake. The project has been tested in different formats, scheduled for several sessions with the same group of participants or a onetime session. With this diversity it was possible for us to explore ideas concerning pedagogy and didactic, method and object, action and material, generally in a non-literal way, although in the end the project as a very explicit request. The final tangible production of ‘De Lápis na Mão’ is precisely de production of several pedagogical materials to be activated with the audiences (visitors of a museum, visitors of a city, mediators, artists, pupils, teachers) 
The workshop we are proposing for ECER is a detour from ‘De Lápis na Mão’. In the duration of this one some different topics have been capital for each of us five. At ECER we will be developing a short-term training session where the identified topics will be structural and will be discussed in the field of practice. We will be introducing the project ‘De Lápis na Mão’, its epistemological grounds, and we will be promoting a workshop session from there where we also aim to discuss and to work on the challenges ‘De Lápis na Mão’ presents to each of us partaking the project. The workshop is not intended to reproduce ‘De Lápis na Mão’, but instead it is set up to expose and explore together with critical participants the fragilities, potentialities and most relevant tensions our topics of discussion may trigger in artists and educators involved in teacher training and educational services in cultural institutions. The production of “didactic” or “pedagogical” materials is the backbone of other related ideas that will be put into conversation and practice during the session.

This workshop is supported by either a theoretical approach and by practical work. The first part aims to introduce participants into the epistemological field around the concepts mobilized in the sessions of ‘De Lápis na Mão’, and the resulting topics our group wants to develop further with the workshop attendants. The practical work will be proposed based on these topics and on ideas related to them. Similarly to the past sessions of ‘De Lápis na Mão’, the workshop activities are thought following the ideas of “machinic assemblage” (Guattari), “discobedient education” (Atkinson) and “event” (Badiou) (Atkinson), and will provide participants with objects constructed and selected as triggers of thought and practice. Our focus is on methodology, or, in other words, in how certain objects (objects here understood in the broader sense) might be presented as methods for doing and being, rather than as inert matter resulting from accomplished tasks and unable to open up to the unknown. We regard the relationship of known/unknown as highly sensitive and defying in the field of education, since it usually stands as a territory of representation and governmentality, where the known works as modus operandi and as the desirable result of every action. Therefore, our attempt to question the didactical and pedagogical is also headed towards the possibility of entering the unknown in the field of arts education. In order to act on multiple aspects of this very general intent, we have gathered a multidisciplinary team with differentiated roles in the management and prosecution of ‘De Lápis na Mão’, ranging from observational functions, to consultant, to the leader of the project with large experience in this sort of training. The varied roles have highlighted different concerns and topics which we have gathered in this single proposal of workshop for ECER. We are five co-authors looking for ways to combine our different lenses in the project in order to elucidate our common research questions.

Our workshop results from a series of sessions of ‘De Lápis na Mão’ that happened in Portugal since 2017 until now. We do not intend to repeat one of those sessions at ECER but, instead, to re-draw it, and to elaborate a workshop that both is supported by the occurrences of ‘De Lápis na Mão’ and by the conversations and self-critical analysis of us as a group involved in its development. We therefore aim to bring to ECER’s context the challenges emerging from the epistemological field of ‘De Lápis na Mão’, the complex tensions it involves between known and unknown, between didactic and pedagogical, and to re-work these activating them through practical activities and theoretical inputs. In the end we expect to be able to re-work our project, and to discuss other possibilities of training and for practices of art education with the workshop attendants.

Atkinson, D. (2002). Art in education identity and practice. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Atkinson, D. (2011). Art, equality and learning pedagogies against the state. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Atkinson, D. (2012). Contemporary Art and Art in Education: The New, Emancipation and Truth. In International Journal of Art & Design Education. Vol. 31 (1): 5-18. Atkinson, D. (2017). Art, Disobedience, and Ethics: The Adventure of Pedagogy, Springer International Publishing. Badiou, A. (2005). Being and event. London ; New York: Continuum. Smith, D. (2012). Essays on Deleuze, Edinburgh University Press Mörsch, C., et al. (2017). Contemporary curating and museum education. Bielefeld, Transcript.