What have we learned from the work we set since 2016 while teaching collaboratively and developing participatory projects with our PhD students in the Arts Education? This initial question resonates an open process, often experienced in discomfort, through the imponderability of the creative and participatory processes that two teachers originally from Education area experienced during their commitment to a PhD in the Arts Education.

This paper aims at contributing towards a discussion of the research training within Arts Education, by setting the example of the idiotic events as proposed by Atkinson (2022) as a core to a democratic, participatory and intercultural teaching and learning environment in Higher Education.

By idiotic events Atkinson  (2022, p. 762) means “a provocation for thought and practice, a questioning presence”. As an idiotic event “does not tell us how to proceed but confers on a situation the power, the challenge, to make us think, as do some art practices produced, performed or orchestrated by artists, or some art practices of children or students”. Then again, this notion “is one that may have the power to make us think or act differently, but it does not offer criteria or guidance by which to do so”; otherwise, this sort of happening “punctures established procedures and produces the potential for a space of speculation in which we might conceive practice beyond the rules and grammars of established practices, a speculative space in which practice can be re-imagined and reconstructed beyond the borders of established thinking” (p. 762). By sorting a way into the idiotic events, Atkison updates and extends the idea of the events of learning that has also been amplified by other researchers (Pardal, 2022; Paz & Caetano, 2019, 2020). 

Having the notion of idiotic event as an inspiration to tackle our professional development narratives, built within a self-study, we aim at discussing our learning - and unlearning (Biesta, 2014; Baldacchino, 2019) - processes, considering our intercultural and collaborative class environments. In fact, all class groups carry important cultural differences, such as the country of origin (mostly from Europe and Latin America), and come from a wide spectrum of areas, such as Dance, Theatre, Visual Arts, etc. This heterogeneity continuously makes us experience idiotic events, as the cultural gap is very easily provoked during the class dialogues. 

Ever since we started to teach at this course we kept diaries, notes, and also developed a wide range of other sorts of productions (drawings, paintings, etc.), which give an account to this sort of events and that are to become the main sources of this research. The main aspect we wish to understand acknowledges the importance of our student’s defying presence and collaboration, but is centered at our own learning processes as teachers and researchers.  

Questions such as: 1) how have we produced a teaching and learning ethics? And 2) How have the idiotic events borne a negation within a democratic framework? are to be key elements of this inquiry.

We departed from the idea of reflecting together in a more traditional collaborative self-study project (Withdrawn to ensure anonymity) but ended up absorbing an important lesson from our teaching: to embed our self-study study within an arts-based approach (Samaras, 2019). We initially intended to write narratives, but soon opted for a wide variety of processes (Hamilton et al., 2008). In fact, as we planned a self-study centered in our narratives, we soon found we both kept personal/professional diaries. Therefore, we developed the work based on writing diaries centered on the same universe of experiences, compiling extremely fragmented and dispersed records, focused on a multiplicity of spheres of action. The material produced included fieldwork notes on the educational processes, transcriptions and talks and interactions, poems and poetic narratives, reflective texts on the writing itself, drawings, paintings, photographs, among other kinds of records. At the same time, the collaborative work is considered an important frame of our teaching and research, and thus the ethical and knowledge implications between teachers and teachers and students are also to be considered within participatory processes (e.g., Caetano & Paz, 2018; Caetano et al., 2019, 2020). To gather and analyze the material, we focused on selected idiotic events that were picked by us. The process of selecting idiotic events is in itself a challenge, as sometimes we are not syntonised into classifying the same happenings as such, or have not mentioned the same events in our writings. Thus the highly subjective process of the identification of these events was a collaborative challenge. We will revisit our previous writings, our diaries and our publications, but also others emerging from our actual practices where we experience new disruptions and regain new insights and will bring them to develop new questionings. Ethical procedures were considered and all the persons involved are to remain anonymous and they were all contacted and given permission to publicly expose their contribution.

Idiotic events made us reinvent our work, and reflecting on them even today brings new insights to continue learning with them. Especially by approaching teacher issues and class contents with a writing strategy, we found “that poetic communal self-study extended reflection and engendered reflection" (Coogler et al., 2022, p. 258). One idiotic event relates to an interest we both share outside classes, the writing of poetry. In a very spontaneous way, we started to include poetic writing in our classes, but the frontal rejection or resistance to this practice came many times the response from all the students, or the majority. They did not claim that they shouldn't write in that genre, but not there, inside the classroom. This refusal happened in different years, in different settings. For example, in 21/22, the class proposal was to write a collective poem on the motto “how I am becoming a researcher”. The idea was received with huge enthusiasm, but working on the text in the classroom, a cold silence was felt… Would we be able to take the students on this poetic adventure? And we were reminded about another year in which the teachers proposed a free written text to the Art Education PhD class and as the students did not share their writing, the teachers decided to go ahead with their poems, creating a negative effect in the class. We realized afterwards that the class felt intimidated. We could not repeat the same mistake, especially as we became aware, as the academic year went on, of the same decorum and circumspection as regards sharing. So, it would make no sense for the teachers to write the poem based on what the student said; instead we would all have to participate horizontally in this process

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