The aim of this proposal is to share “Articulation” through video. “Articulation” is an animation practice in a collaborative production with pupils. I used video to document and reflect on the challenges of collaborative practice in arts education classes as part of formal school education. Video is used as a documentation process through this practice, which includes the participants as active members in producing memories for research reflections.

”Articulation” is one of the practices developed as a part of my Ph.D. in Arts Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto. This practice has involved middle school students from the 7th to the 9th grade in the cities of Braga and Gaia in Northern Portugal, from 2018 until today, and teachers of Visual Education classes, including myself.

The purpose of the practices developed was to reconfigure school curricula for the duration of one year. Instead of keep doing Visual Education classes based on short-term exercises or small projects that test pupil skills and technical abilities in visual arts, I intended to deal with the curricula collaboratively, on a short-film animation production with students. With these practices, we wanted to deviate from the positive and predictable rhetorical effects and learnings of their curricula (Gatzambide-Fernandez, 2013, p.215).  We based our practice on the uncertainties of the learnings and the artistic ‘doings’. Instead of respecting the need to complete the project, we assumed that we need to value the artistic learning processes of the students. We managed the tasks collaboratively. We purposely did not establish a rigid schedule of tasks, taking the risk of not finishing the animated shorts in time. We did not correspond with a perfect articulation of this project with the school curriculum themes, nor with the illusion that all students must learn to perform the same tasks.

As Baldacchino stated, learning “(…) cannot entertain an end-objective (…)” or “(…)entertain an accumulation of knowns achieved through a process that eliminates the unknowns.” (Baldacchino, 2019, p.43) The intention was to experience gestures of artistic education that aim to be collective (Bishop, 2012, p-93-99) and resist instrumentalized practices (Baldacchino,2019, p.x), segmentary and sedimented subjects as well as the exclusive individualism approach to the student’s technical and personal skills which is currently present in the process of educating arts in Portugal in mass formal education (Martins, 2011, p.235-237). In contrast, I aimed to activate practices ”that understand the impact of learning, beyond the institution .” as Jake Watts (2018) proposes. As part of my research, this video reflection mobilizes the challenges of constituting a participatory practice in schools beyond the interactive and the active /passive binary of participation (Bishop, 2012, p.93); based on my diary reflections on that matter (Carmo, 2022). Through these moving image records, I discuss the tensions and conflicts that such collaborative practice poses to elitist and a technocratic way of teaching, doing, and thinking about arts and arts education practices. I have been bringing to the reflection of this research the diversity of doing and thinking the artistic, in a transdisciplinary way, and thinking about the importance of relativizing what it is to be artistic, and what is artistic doing to young students. As my theoretical concepts, I have been searching to develop and questioning the ephemeral, the invisible learnings, the sensitivities that a scale cannot measure or an evaluation grid (Ranciére, 2010), the impact and the differentiation of long-term projects in the pupils’ life (Mörsch, 2009), the unpredictable (Watts, 2014) and the risks, within a school system over bureaucratic, and over planned by the institutionalization of the art education. (Baldacchino, 2019, p.13)

I use video as a tool for documenting through the participant's eye what’s happening in my art education classes. This particular video plays with the boundaries of reality and fiction because I use the footage and images taken by the students and the teachers in different classes, and parts of the animation short films that resulted from the project. I reflect with and through the documentation images, and I set a video essay with them to show. I intended to make sure that the audience understand that this film is just one of the possible narratives that could be brought for presenting these practices. This tool helped me to see and think about the experiences in the classroom through other participants' perspectives, and to be aware of things that I didn’t understand at the moment. As the form chosen for this presentation, video allows the audience to enter in participants' eyes and to be aware of my reflections in the moment of the practice and the experiences. When I choose to use video as a method for research, I ask participants to collect their contributions freely, of what they want, and whenever they want. They were encouraged to develop their own preferences regarding visualities and poetics in the images captured. We have collected testimonials of the participants in memory diaries and reports in every classroom session. I also presented through video, other videos and projects of dissemination done by the teachers to present the animation project to school community. The quotes presented in the movie have been extracted from comments and opinions that have been expressed during the process of the project; preferring this strategy over an intrusive inquiry or interview that might break the flow of the class. Their workflow, their participation, and their presence in the project have been reflected also and commented on in the video. The practice-based approach of my project follows the aim to turn my research as artistic as possible and to dissolve the project within the school community. This turns a balance move for the way the artistic is experienced in schools. My practice is focused on long-term projects within the school community, rather than single workshops, exclusive visits to an art exhibition, or short-term projects. My presence in schools as an artist invited and as an art teacher merged, and I became one more teacher through the pupils' school year.

This video presents a view of my practice-based research and does not intend to present a one-fits-all formula practice or reveal the positive effects of an experience. Instead, it aims to demonstrate the awareness of the sensitivities of the relations, the ephemeral, the unexpected workflows, and the representations that have been left apart from the academic research, if not shown by video. It is a capture of its movement, its visualities, and its poetics. During the processes of arts education practices, they used to be left apart if they were being transformed into a text, a paper, or a flyer. We intended to formulate questions rather than answers. We aim to share and create a dialogue of experiences to do justice to their diversity and their singularities. We experiment with the ‘doing of the artistic’ in schools as a way to resist the controlling of arts, to the programming and segmentation in school curricula. In a normalized approach, artistic used to produce: exclusive, limited, and fragmented moments of engagement. My year-long presence and the integration of the animation project with continuity make students realize that they are no longer responding to a large number of predictable tasks, for short periods of time. This project becomes theirs, as the decisions are taken by them every step of the way, and they feel control over what is to be made in the next class session in order to continue.

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