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.