LabEA-Felgueiras, created in 2019, consists of a pilot project in the area of Arts Education, aimed at the teacher training of the 1st cycle of Basic Education (designated 1st C.E.B) and Pre-primary Education, that involves the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP), through its Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade (i2ADS), and the Municipality of Felgueiras (CMF), an institution situated 60 km away from the city of Porto, in the north interior region of Portugal.

The project starts with a competition launched by the CMF to create a partnership with a specialist entity in the area of Arts Education, aiming to improve the quality of teaching and, therefore, to combat school failure, assuming that the student’s failure  (seen mainly from a perspective of acquisition of schooled knowledge) could be solved by using the arts.

In this sense, i2ADS/FBAUP mobilized a team of researchers, composed of 7 artists/educators/researchers from FBAUP to work in schools, in proximity with children and the teachers of basic education. The previous work done by the team, on a national and international level, allowed a diagnosis concerning the way in which the expressive areas are approached in these levels of education and the main problems associated to their development. However, the specificities of this project were forcing us to reframe that diagnosis, intersecting it with other factors, namely, the objectives stated in its agreement. Therefore, one of the objectives of the team was to begin by deconstructing the initial premisses that originate the project, that is, on one hand, the issues related to the knowledges legitimised by the educational institution and the ways of working that result in comparative evaluation practices and, on the other hand, the idea that the arts could be instrumentalised in this salvation narrative (Gaztambide, 2013; Martins, 2018a). This subversive agenda would start to take shape in the regular work with the teachers and the children, destabilizing the excluding forms of power. 

The project involves 5 schools of the 1st cycle of basic education, with two classes in each (a 1st grade and a 2nd grade one) and the respective teachers are involved, making a total of nine teachers and 189 students. As researchers we have planned together with teachers activities to develop with their children in the classroom, and we have been present in the class space to support the proposals and to observe the reactions. Most of our conclusions so far derive from live observation and debate among team members and with teachers (we have organized a focus group). We have documented most of our activities in the school. Besides organisational meetings to exchange critical perspectives on the project, as

From the work done so far, we can say that we have failed in our intentions on the ground, but we have opened spaces of rupture and of thought as a team of researchers that allow us to continue to try to develop alternative practices to an arts education based on manufacture, on ideas of geniality and of talent, on the repetition and the reproduction of imperialist stories of art and education. Now the project will enter a different phase, less interventive in the classroom, and more focused on the training of teachers, where we will try to confront the perspectives of the teachers with our difficulties and failures. Parallel to this, the project takes on the mission to organize public seminars of sharing and debate of the processes and the results obtained and, also, accredited training actions for primary teachers of the county of Felgueiras. With this presentation we seek to reflect on our place as researchers in this project, confronting the experience on the ground with the desires that we carry in relation to other arts education practices. The places that we began to occupy implied compromises that have displaced us often from our initial purposes and it is on the strength of that disappointment that we want to reflect here as well.

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