This paper emerges from the European project EXPECT_Art: EXPloring and Educating Cultural Literacy Through Art (HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-01, grant agreement 101132662), which seeks to identify the barriers and potential of promoting critical cultural literacy through the arts in formal education (EXPECT_Art, 2025). Within this framework, the contribution is based on a case study developed by the research team of the University of Barcelona in a public school in the city. The research focuses on how artistic practices can overflow and reconfigure certain notions of the body embedded in the curriculum of primary school.

The study is grounded in an understanding of the curriculum not merely as a set of prescribed content, but as a discursive and material apparatus through which bodies are taught, shaped and regulated within educational contexts. As Paraskeva and Steinberg (2016) argue, the curriculum operates as one of the key devices through which modern schooling produces and reproduces hegemonic ways of being and thinking. In this sense, the curriculum not only structures what is to be learned, but also delimits how bodies can appear and matter in the classroom, shaping subjectivities and forms of participation (Gore, 2000; Hernández-Hernández, 2017).

In the current Catalan educational framework, organised around a competence-based curriculum (Decret 175/2022), education is presented as a holistic process aimed at cognitive, emotional, social and cultural development. Although the body is formally recognised as part of this integral formation, its presence across the curriculum is uneven and fragmented. While in early childhood, education about the body is explicitly foregrounded as a central means of learning through sensory and experiential engagement, in primary education it becomes progressively marginalised. The body tends to be confined to specific areas such as physical education and, to a lesser extent, the arts, while in so-called core subjects it is largely reduced to a functional or instrumental dimension (Rosales, 2010).

This transition is not neutral. Between stages, the body shifts from being a means of learning to becoming an object of knowledge (de Riba Mayoral et al., 2024). It is increasingly approached as something that must be measured, managed, and optimised in relation to health, behaviour, emotional regulation, and cultural norms. This conception is rooted in a modern epistemological tradition that privileges rationality, control, abstract logic, and functionality over embodied, sensory, and relational ways of knowing that foreground bodily experience.

In response to this background, the study draws on feminist decolonial (Anzaldúa, 1987; Lugones, 2008) and feminist new materialisms perspectives (Barad, 2007; Revelles-Benavente, 2025), which understand the body not as a stable, autonomous entity but as a situated, relational and constantly becoming assemblage. From these perspectives, bodies are constituted through their entanglements with other bodies, with materials, with spaces and with cultural discourses, and knowledge is always produced in and through these embodied relations (Haraway, 1988). In this sense, how bodies are positioned, allowed to move, and invited to participate in school contexts is never neutral, as they always involve political and ethical dimensions (Federici, 2022).

Situated in this theoretical horizon, the arts appear as a particularly fertile space for troubling dominant curricular constructions and constraints about the body. Rather than conceiving arts education as the transmission of artistic contents or techniques, this paper understands education through the arts as an embodied and situated pedagogical practice (Hernández, 2019) that mobilises bodies in action and opens up multiple ways of sensing, knowing and meaning making. Arts-based practices provide multimodal methods that allow bodies to experiment, to play and to create, generating movements and affects that exceed predetermined curricular outcomes (Atkinson, 2018; Calderón-García & Hernández-Hernández, 2019).

This study is based on a case study developed by the University of Barcelona research team in a public school located in El Carmel, a neighbourhood of Barcelona characterised by cultural diversity and social vulnerability. The school, originally a primary school that expanded to include secondary education in 2021, works through project-based learning (Generalitat de Catalunya, n/d) and seeks to provide a coherent and transformative educational experience throughout compulsory schooling. Fieldwork was carried out during the 2024–2025 academic year, following an ethnographic orientation on case studies (Simons, 2011). A first phase (October–December 2024) involved participant observation to become familiar with the institution’s ecology and establish relationships with teachers and students. In a second phase (January–May 2025), the research team collaborated with teachers to design and implement a series of art-based methods within the Art Workshop for students of both fourth-grades mixed together (children aged 9–10). Curricular contents proposed by the teachers—specifically the locomotor system and healthy habits—were explored through artistic practices informed by a critical and arts-based pedagogical approach (Hernández-Hernández, 2019). Across 18 sessions, the project named by the students Art d’4rt (Fourth’s Art), unfolded through body mapping, movement-based games, drawing, storytelling, collage, painting, stop-motion animation, oral interviews and audiovisual recording. The process culminated in a video-art piece and a school exhibition open to younger pupils and families, in which students’ productions appeared as possible expressions to foster critical cultural literacy. Data generation combined participant observation, semi-structured interviews (Bryman, 2012), questionnaires and a collaborative field diary written after each session by three researchers (Kroef et al., 2020). Two researchers facilitated the workshops while a third focused on documentation, resulting in field notes that constitute situated and embodied accounts of what happened in the classroom (Haraway, 1988). As the process unfolded, the research question emerged responsively from the fieldwork (St. Pierre, 2021): how do the arts overflow the notion of the body in the primary school curriculum? Analysis was conducted through a diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992; Revelles-Benavente, 2014), which approaches educational phenomena as relational and entangled rather than as stable objects. The field materials were read through three analytical gestures that the research team enables to organize questions about how bodies can be, move and act within the curriculum. These gestures allowed theory and empirical material to intra-act, making visible how artistic practices reconfigure curricular and relational notions of the body.

Across three artistic methods developed in the classroom and chosen for analysis, the research shows how the arts open the possibility to diffract a pedagogical question addressed to the students into a research question about the curriculum itself. What began as an invitation to imagine how a more-than-human body (created by the students) could look, move and live, shifted into three analytical gestures that question how human bodies are represented, allowed to move, and culturally framed within the primary school curriculum. This displacement, and what unfolds from this framework, reveals that the curriculum is not only a set of contents, but a dispositif that actively configures what bodies can (not) be and (not) do in school. Through collage, performance and speculative storytelling, the project generated situations that disturbed what is usually offered in an ordered and predictable way in the classroom. These artistic practices did not simply add creative activities to the curricular content of the locomotor system and healthy habits; they also created spaces of uncertainty where norms could be questioned. In this process, the normativity of the human body, the regulation of movement in the classroom, and the assumption of “healthy habits” as universal and homogeneous were put into tension. What emerged instead were the everyday, cultural and familial habits that shape how students inhabit their bodies within their own socio-cultural context and how these ways of knowing can foster a critical cultural literacy. Finally, although the Catalan curriculum presents itself as open, the study also points to the persistence of a priori knowledge (Maturana, 2020) circulating through inherited teaching practices. Arts-based practices, often positioned at the margins (Garcés, 2013), precisely come from the edges, capable of overflowing the curriculum and opening it to other ways of being, moving, relating and learning.

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