Research into arts education typically examines the objectives, content, procedures, and assessment of teaching practices, student learning, and organizational initiatives.  A bibliometric analysis by Fontan and Martínez-Rodríguez (2024) reveals that publications on arts education fall into two main areas: teaching and learning processes, and therapeutic processes in community and social interventions. Specifically, this analysis identifies, in the first area, the following research issues as predominant during the period 2000-2025: formal education in the school environment and the curriculum; the development of creativity; and higher education and teacher education. This analysis shows that research focuses on “what is done,” but is rare on what these practices do in the lives of schools, students, teachers, and families. 

Examining what arts education proposals and practices do aligns with the new materialist approach, which focuses on the “agency” of things—or, as Jane Bennett (2010) puts it, on what things do rather than what they mean. As Tota and De Feo (2022) point out, this means attending to the structuring properties of art and its artifacts in educational environments, rather than their structured properties. It requires acknowledging art’s agency and performative nature—its capacity to shape learning processes, relationships, and the subjectification of those involved. This perspective reframes arts practice as agency: the right to act.

We pursued this direction in a recent study linked to the European EXPECT_Art project, investigating the epistemic communities associated with arts education practices in two schools (Hernández-Hernández, Espinosa & Ruiz, in press). This research enabled us to catalog the observed artistic practices and organize them according to three frameworks: arts education, education through the arts, and the use of art in education.

Building on this framework and research experience, this paper examines how artistic practices operate as forces within the classroom and how they are articulated in subsequent interviews with participants. As lived experiences, the arts can position participants in unexpected ways when they allow themselves to be affected. This study draws on Deleuze’s notion of affects, understood as movements or shifts from one state to another that emerge in encounters between bodies (Deleuze, 1998). These affective movements persist beyond the immediate experience, leaving traces that can be recognized in what participants later recount. The paper therefore focuses on these echoes of experience as they appear in the oral testimonies shared through interviews, of those involved in and reflecting on the artistic practices developed within the research project.

Emphasizing this dimension contributes to the field by strengthening the connection between research in arts education and the affects that artistic practices have on people's lives, beyond their planning and implementation. In line with the new materialist concern with what practices do, the paper's focus extends beyond researchers' observations or interpretations. Instead, it seeks to understand arts education through how students and teachers articulate the ways these practices affect them, shape relationships, and reconfigure their positions within the school environment.

This approach aligns with perspectives that understand artistic practice as a form of knowledge production enacted through practice itself, as proposed by Barrett (2007). From this standpoint, art functions as an epistemic practice that generates understanding through doing. Similarly, following Hickey-Moody (2016), this paper considers art as having the capacity to reconfigure what participants are able to understand, produce, and connect with in educational contexts. Attention to the affective traces articulated in participants’ narratives allows us to explore how artistic practices operate as agents within educational environments, contributing to processes of learning and subjectification in schools.

This paper is part of the research carried out from the European EXPECT_Art project (EXPloring and Educating Cultural Literacy Through Art), which tries to identify barriers and possibilities for fostering critical cultural literacy through the arts in formal education across Europe. To account for this purpose, the University of Barcelona team conducted ethnographic case studies (Simons, 2009) in two public schools in Barcelona. Fieldwork was carried out during the 2024–2025 academic year, following an ethnographic case study approach. A first phase (October–December 2024) consisted of participant observation aimed at becoming familiar with each school's institutional ecology and establishing relationships with teachers, students, and community members. This phase focused on understanding how artistic practices were already present in everyday school life. In a second phase (January–May 2025), the research team collaborated with teachers to design and implement a series of artistic proposals integrated into classroom learning projects. During this phase, particular attention was paid to identifying critical incidents (Tripp, 1993; Gremler, 2004): situations in which participants’ engagement with artistic practices generated notable reactions, shifts, or affects relevant to cultural literacy and learning. Participants included 137 students aged 9–15, 10 teachers, and 4 community members involved in the arts-based activities and learning projects. At the end of the fieldwork period, data were complemented through semi-structured interviews and brief surveys with students, teachers, and community participants involved in the second phase. These methods provided space for participants to reflect on their experiences and articulate the perceived affects of the artistic practices beyond the immediate classroom setting. Data analysis was guided by the conceptual framework of the EXPECT_Art project. Field notes, critical incidents, interview records, and survey responses were transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis (O’Reilly & Dogra, 2017). Initial coding was oriented by EXPECT_Art analytical axes related to children’s engagement with art, aesthetic experiences, expressions of critical perspectives, and the role of the school environment in recognizing cultural literacy. Building on this first level of analysis, this paper introduces a second thematic focus centered on the agency of the arts: how artistic practices generate affects in participants’ learning processes, relationships, subjectivities, and ways of understanding reality. This analysis seeks to trace how these affects are articulated and narrated by participants, foregrounding the relational, affective, and material dimensions through which the agency of the arts becomes visible in school life.

Understanding pedagogical practices through the lens of “agency” means examining the affects they generate. This requires attending to the corporeal, cognitive, relational, and aesthetic shifts that students, teachers, and communities experience and articulate when given the opportunity. While research processes rarely allow for extended follow-up—limiting the possibility of fully exploring the agency of the arts—the post-fieldwork interviews provided a crucial space for reflection. This space enabled participants to reconstruct the affects and traces left by artistic experiences and to articulate shifts in practices learned or inherited within the school context. The interviews thus complemented the observations while revealing a dimension of artistic agency that rarely emerges in the immediate moment of practice. In this research, the agency of artistic practices reveals modulations of experience that: a) shift how learning is understood in school, b) generate openness to discuss complex realities beyond homogenous normativity, c) enable verbalization of subjective dimensions, and d) raise questions about relational life in the classroom, school, and family and community contexts. These movements of agency are neither homogeneous nor linear, yet they highlight the arts’ potential to generate situated and unforeseen forms of knowledge and affection. The findings suggest that artistic practices leave traces that persist and reconfigure participants’ educational experiences, making visible their agency within school life and beyond. In the presentation, each type of agency is illustrated with quotes from teachers, students, and community members. These quotes demonstrate how the perspective of agency—understood as movements of affection—can expand arts education research beyond the focus on experientiality discussed in the first part of this paper.

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