This paper departs from the problematization of the use of the exhibition apparatus in an educational context. In art classes, and as a derivation of what Efland coined as school art style (1976), students are often asked to partake in collective final year exhibitions or similar formats that publicize achievements and end products of the curricular activity. The ubiquity of the exhibition school is often seen as a celebratory event that is optimal to disseminate the proofs of performed learning, and therefore testifying effective schooling. Thus, exhibitions are useful popular tools, as advocated by education policy makers (Unesco, 2006), since they allow for external evaluation of teachers and schools’ performances. Additionally, exhibitions ought to be regarded as an opportunity to set public the enclosed school work of both teacher and student, most times contained within school walls, preventing its dissemination and public discussions. How often do we catch high school teachers speaking on TV, except when they are on strike to demand better career conditions? And how does the common citizen imagine and refer to the undergraduate school work developed by the art teacher? Is it a fair vision that plays any justice to the complex reality of school life, as well as interrogates the material relationships that art can establish with the fundamental contemporary social and political issues?

This paper is written by two teachers in training and an assistant professor in the Master of Teaching of Visual Arts (MEAV) in Porto University. Framed by this program, a second semester assignment resulted in a pedagogical experience - “Uma Escola Para…” - that allowed us to proceed with the inquiry addressed on this paper. These student teachers in training were asked to speculate on the potentiality of artistic experience by rehearsing ways in which the artistic dimension would enter the educational institution, contaminating school work in a more decisive and purposeful manner. The assignment didn't intend to offer a vision of art as panacea, yet invited to the experimentation of its political agency (Martins & Almeida, 2013), intellectual richness and technical familiarity through education and professional experience of the students. The school space was re-read as an artistic arena for these teachers to intervene in order to re-imagine the educational institution after contemporary issues. The final step of the assignment was an exhibition of the developed works in an art center. The experience intended to explore activities to make students engage with a more political approach to teaching, and reconceptualize the roles assigned to teachers and students within usual school expectations. The experimentation with the growing artistic dimension intended to reformulate the identity of school teacher as of the cultural worker (Knoester & Yu, 2015; Giroux, 1988; 1992), and eventually increase its social interest. Teachers in training were invited to participate in the exhibition by reviewing established hierarchies contained in the pedagogical relationship, and by assuming leadership roles in the process of assembling and communicating the exhibition. Likewise, this culminating record of an experience of exhibiting and designing the exhibition, proved to be a starting point for formulating questions around the sensitivity and intimacy of the process of exhibiting work, in terms of production and participation, especially when these exercises are turned into pedagogical instruments of a learning process inside or outside the physical space of the school. What are the purposes of introducing these types of exercises as a pedagogical instrument? What feelings are evoked in the process of exhibiting and what does it mean to evoke them in a pedagogical environment? In this sense, the act of exhibiting will also be approached as an act of exposing.

The presented inquiry will rely on the case study of a personal experience, and a collective one, of exhibiting our own work, developed in the scope of a curricular unit of our first year of the Master's degree - “Uma Escola Para…”, which was documented on the first issue of LabEA_Log. The case is presented here in order to question certain naturalizations regarding the value of exhibitions within schools, while, at the same time, exploring more critical approaches to such instrument and bringing alternative possibilities to regard it, such as questioning the pedagogical value of exhibiting knowledge-that-is, and investing instead to exhibit school work as a form of research in process. Moreover the case study will allow us to explore, in depth, the pedagogical relationships that occur in such processes, through the involvement of such different parties. The initial premise is to analyze the hypothesis that to exhibit is also to expose a degree of intimacy, and how such formulation would become a manifestation of power-relations within the school environment, that urges to be questioned. A major part of the research is based in a traditional understanding of academic knowledge framed in social sciences, and therefore finds in literature review the useful tool to conceptualize ideas and to organize thoughts in a larger network of references. Such a take on the literature review rendered a contextualization of the ‘exhibition as research’ epistemological issue (Niedderer, Biggs & Ferris, 2006; Bjerregaard, 2020), whilst borrowing from it the idea of ‘laboratory’, or particularly that of ‘experiment’ (Bjerregaard, 2020; Obrist, 2001), the latter to become central in the curricular assignment that guides our main case study - “Uma Escola Para…” -. A brief contextualization of current schooling is offered, given it is the school environment that sets the grounds where the assignment was expected to unfold. And the figure of the teacher as cultural worker (Knoester & Yu, 2015; Giroux, 1988; 1992) was introduced to propose the expansion of the teacher as a national curriculum employee. By breaking up that rather limiting role generally assigned to teachers, this paper suggests more sensuous possibilities to enrich teaching performances through the experience of art, by pushing it further to the inclusion of each trainee’s professional artistic experience.

The mobilization of specific concepts aligned has allowed for more clear impressions on the themes brought into this paper and a more informed and critical view on the sensed problems of exhibiting school works as a curricular task. One notion that arises during this research is the denaturalization of the solitary and armored fabrication of intimacy in school contexts. We are not advocating for the exposure of intimate choices and ways of living, by demanding for unintended publication, including in a school exhibition of artistic works, but, instead, to reflect on the conditioning that a livable life (Butler, 2004) provokes even in more individual and intimate layers of a person’s life, as if the everyday wasn't an epistemological dimension that resonates the importance of biography in the understanding and critical reviewing of sociological, pedagogical and cultural normative constructions (Essed, 1991; Mills, 1969). The exhibition of artworks as school assignment can enable such discussion by negotiating themes such as participation and curatorial rationales setting up the display and assembly of works, becoming in itself the trigger of visibility - through publication - of a profession often threw into domesticity, discretion and uncharming circumstances and pedagogical processes of which are only disseminated results and achievements. Ultimately, the added visibility is eventually prompted by the appeal and capacity of art making to relate and communicate with the world issues through the production of materialities (Coole & Frost, 2010; Braidotti, 2011) The role of conceptualization and intellectualization of school work is conveyed by the process of research, and its subsequent materialization in forms of dissemination (such as LabEA_LOG#1, the exhibition itself and its parallel program of activities), hopefully resisting commodification and aestheticization - while an obligation to remain attentive to these same traps lurking with the fetishization of process is to be taken seriously.

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