This paper falls into the general domain of teacher education and focuses on the specific domain of "curricular didactics", that is, on didactics as a subject integrated in a teacher education program, the intersectional space where "professional didactics" (didactical empirical knowledge) and "investigative didactics" (didactical research knowledge) complement each other, as defined by Alarcão (1997). The context of this research is the teaching and learning of didactics, through the subjects of Didactics of Plastic Arts I (DPA I) and Didactics of Plastic Arts II (DPA II), in the Masters in Visual Arts Teaching of the University of Lisbon, since 2009-2010.

From a constructivist perspective of learning, the starting point of DPA I is the student’s experiences. We begin with their experiences as students and their practices as teachers in training. These experiences are informally shared and then analyzed, reflected upon and discussed at length, integrating different spheres of knowledge and research. DPA II comprises mainly practical activities, catalyzed by didactic interrogation, and expanded and understood at a deeper level through dialogue (De la Torre, 2000). Students-teachers are invited to create didactic units and place them into practice with colleagues’ participation. They reflect upon these practices not only individually but also through collaborative research (Zeichner, 1998). Also, conflict and error are emphasized as learning strategies (De la Torre, 2000). Continuous evaluation of this subject takes into account the active participation in all class activities as well as the creation of portfolios that summarize the dynamic interactions in class. Portfolios include class activities as well as in-class diaries and field diaries, experience reports as well as notes on thoughts and activities related to the contents of each activity.

The main purpose of these subjects is to contribute to the development of a genuine concern and a critical standpoint on visual arts education, which we envisage to achieve by continually connecting and transpositioning knowledge between the professional didactic and the investigative didactic (Alarcão, 1997). The "professional didactics" is embodied in the description of learners’ experiences, as some of them have already begun their professional practices, and all of them when students have built their own conceptions of what teaching and learning the visual arts undertakes (Lortie, 1975). The "investigative didactics" is present in contemporary research on education, pedagogy and didactics of visual arts, which are submitted to analysis and constitute the base for learners’ reflection.

After almost ten years teaching these subjects and after a written thesis on this issue (Sousa, 2016), we wonder whether our approach really helps prospective teachers go through the transition between who they are and who they intend to become as visual arts teachers.

This paper results from an action research developed by us as professors in the field of "curricular didactics", over almost ten academic years. It is part of a qualitative research paradigm as defined by Flick (2005 [2002]) and also followed a critical orientation towards social change, according to Pérez Serrano (2002 [1994]). Focusing on the dynamics implemented in Didactics of Plastic Arts I and Didactics of Plastic Arts II (DPA I and DPA II), which aims at the re-signification of curricular didactics in the context of Portuguese visual arts teacher education, and taking as object of analysis not only a class in a single semester or in a single school year, but several classes during consecutive lectures of two semesters, since 2009-2010, this research is also a multiple case study, which is justified given the diversity of data needed to achieve a deep understanding of the research issues.

As curricular didactics, these subjects contribute to the fertile relation between the professional and the investigative dimensions of didactics. They bring together the empirical knowledge and the investigative knowledge behind personal, academic, professional and investigative contexts, bestowing coherence to the learners’ lives as individuals, students and teachers (currently or potentially) of the contemporary Portuguese compulsory educational system. Thus, they strive to enhance and compel students to build their identities as reflexive teachers. While student-teachers were engaged in the cognitive process of remembering, describing and sharing some of their own educational experiences of visual arts, they started making connections between visual arts knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, research knowledge and empirical knowledge, past and present concepts of art and education, being artists and being teachers, being students and being teachers, and so on. They often made connections (on average two or three per student in each experienced-based writing activity) between those experiences and the way they teach today. It was interesting to conclude that the experiences they lived through as secondary level students were more significant for them than the experiences lived as university students, which were the most significant for them in the construction of a theoretical framework of visual arts thinking. The kind of projects developed with their students often show similarities to the kind of projects they developed as secondary level students. Even when these similarities are not present, there is still an inverse relationship between the kinds of projects. However, when we compare the students' emerging beliefs in their portfolios (written in DPA I) and the underlying ones to the workshops (conducted by them during the following semester, in DPA II), we conclude that what they believe is not always reflected in their teaching. The gap between conceptions and practices has diminished, but still prevails.

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