In recent decades, research exploring new paradigms of learning in the university context has proliferated, particularly through qualitative and postqualitative approaches in educational research. These perspectives have proven relevant for investigating how learning is given meaning, how it affects, and how it transforms people in higher education, shifting the focus from institutional frameworks toward biographical approaches that intertwine learning and identity across life trajectories (Biesta, 2008; Hernández-Hernández, 2023).

The importance of research aimed at rethinking university academic training through individuals’ life trajectories highlights the relevance of the affective turn in contemporary conceptions of learning. From this onto-epistemological perspective, affects are understood as forces with their own autonomy in the generation of knowledge, beyond their confinement to discourse (Massumi, 2002). As changes or shifts that emerge in encounters between bodies (Colman, 2010), affects precede individuality and place relationality at the center of learning. Learning, from this standpoint, is always a relational process in which we co-constitute ourselves through relationships (Barad, 2007), assuming the situated and partial nature of knowledge (Haraway, 1988).

Within the framework of university teacher education, this approach makes it possible to position affects not only as a dimension of learning, but as a central axis for rethinking research in academia and the relationship it establishes with students.

This research is part of the Master’s Final Project in Visual Arts and Education, completed during the 2023–2024 academic year at the University of Barcelona. The starting point consisted of exploring imaginaries of art and education among students enrolled in the Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education at the same university, with an emphasis on their learning trajectories, within the context of a pedagogical transformation process of a compulsory course in visual arts education in which the author was the instructor.

The research considered artistic practices as forms of interpreting the world and generating narratives, with a specific capacity to mobilize affects and enable meaningful learning. In this sense, it aligns with the understanding of the arts as practices sensitive to the expressiveness of the subject and open to inquiring into the qualities of life that affect what we know and how we live (Barone & Eisner, 2011). As Marina Garcés points out, the arts are, above all, practices of the threshold (Garcés, 2013), from which it becomes possible to question how we look at our surroundings, how we are affected, and, consequently, how we learn.

From this paradigm, artistic experience is conceived as inherently pedagogical and transformative, and as facilitating a form of learning that validates the experience of the “we" (Aguirre, 2006). This approach connects with contributions such as those of Sheikh (2009), who points to the need to shift academia from a model centered on the reproduction of knowledge toward the configuration of spaces for experience and thought, and those of Rogoff (2008), who proposes understanding fallibility as a form of knowledge production. In this context, it is increasingly necessary to explore educational paradigms that unfold relationships of proximity and pedagogical formats sensitive to affects within the university (Riera-Retamero & Hernández-Hernández, 2020). Artistic practices can thus become triggers for transformation and open spaces for reflection sensitive to becoming (Hernández-Hernández & Revelles Benavente, 2019; Atkinson, 2015).

From this perspective, the article not only analyzes affects as the content of the research, but also shows how the research process itself becomes an affective space that allows for rethinking the relationship between academia and students in university teacher education.

The research adopts a qualitative approach and takes the form of a focus group with five students from the Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education who, during the 2023–2024 academic year, were enrolled in the course Didactics of Visual and Plastic Education. The singularity of the focus group lies in its capacity to generate knowledge from the synergies that emerge in conversation among participants (Green et al., 2003), understood as both a methodological and pedagogical tool for shared production (hooks, 2022). In this regard, the criterion of prior acquaintance among participants became a facilitating element, since, as Kitzinger (1994) notes, situating research within pre-existing groups can foster a greater willingness to engage, contrast, and question one another’s contributions. Four sessions were designed to explore imaginaries of art and education based on the participants’ learning trajectories. The study draws on methods from arts-based research, incorporating visual prompts and artistic practices as devices to mobilize experiences and narratives that are not always articulable exclusively through discourse (Barone & Eisner, 2011; Sullivan, 2004; Hernández-Hernández, 2008; Wang et al., 2017). The researcher adopts a participant role, sharing the activities and making her situated position within the process explicit. Methodological decisions are permeated by an ethics of care, particularly relevant given the prior relationship with participants as students in the course. Care is understood as a practice of attentiveness to the subjectivities and affects that shape the research, aimed at generating a space of trust, recognition and reciprocity (Estalayo et al., 2022). Within this framework, specific methods were implemented, such as check-in/check-out dynamics (Larre, 2023), transparent and continuous communication, and the return of generated knowledge through shared materials and the collective creation of a publication as a way to socialize the knowledge generated. Data analysis combines a narrative approach—porous to the modulations and contingencies of the encounters—with an inductive analysis grounded in constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006). This combination makes it possible to account both for the affective shifts of lived experience and for the systematic coding of emerging imaginaries about art and education, following a situated and co-constructed conception of knowledge.

Analysis of the focus group sessions highlights the central role of affects in research within the context of university teacher education. Beyond exploring imaginaries of art and education, the work foregrounds the ways in which academia relates to students and the tensions that emerge from this relationship. Making space for and recognizing affects implies understanding research ethics as a relational, interdependent practice. Affects are shown to be a constitutive dimension of the research process, shaping methodological decisions, forms of relationship, and modes of knowledge production, and opening the possibility of rethinking the relationship between academia and students from an affective pedagogy. The construction of the sessions revealed that research does not progress in a linear manner, but rather begins in the middle (Springgay & Truman, 2017). Assuming this positioning entails conceiving research as a situated and responsive practice, in which knowledge emerges from within processes rather than as the result of external observation. Within this framework, the narrative approach sustained a condition of openness and provisionality, offering a way of narrating research that accompanies events and their effects without foreclosing meaning. Conversation, understood as a research method, enabled the articulation of shifts in students’ experiences, as well as an account of the affects that modulated both the encounters and the lived experience of university education. Finally, the research critically examined processes of otherness within the research itself. In coherence with a conception of art as experience and of artistic practices as open narratives within the spectrum of the “we” (Aguirre, 2006), the study sought not to understand the “other” as a pre-given category, nor to fix presumed identities. Framing the research through an ethics of care involved understanding it as a situated relational practice, grounded in availability to the other and an attitude of listening to difference.

Aguirre, I. (2006). Modelos formativos en educación artística: Imaginando nuevas presencias para las artes en educación. A Foro Virtual Permanente del Congreso Regional en Formación Artística y Cultural para América Latina y El Caribe. Bogotà, Colombia. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Duke University Press. Barone, T. i Eisner, W. (2011). Arts based research. SAGE Publications, Inc. Biesta, G. (2008). Learning Lives: Learning, Identity and Agency in the Life-course: Full Research Report ESRC End of Award Report, RES-139-25-0111. Swindon: ESRC. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. London, United Kingdom: Sage. Coleman, F. (2010). Affect. Dins Parr, A. (ed.), The Deleuzian Dictionary, 11-14. Edinburgh University Press. Estalayo, P., Hernández-Hernández, F., Lozano, P., Gil, J. (2022). Ética y pedagogías de los cuidados en escuelas de Barcelona. Posibilidades, cuestionamientos y resistencias. Revista Izquierdas, 51, 1-23 Garcés, M. (2013). Un mundo común. Bella Terra, Barcelona. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hernandez-Hernandez, F. (2008). La investigación basada en las artes. Propuestas para repensar la investigación en educación. Educatio Siglo XXI, 26, 85–118. Hernandez-Hernandez, F. (2023). Exploring University Students’ Practices of Affects on Their Cartographic Learning Trajectories. In: Carrasco Segovia, S.V., Hernández Hernández, F., Sancho-Gil, J.M. (eds) Affective Cartographies (pp.173-189). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42163-1_11 hooks, b. (2022). Ensenyar pensament crític. Raig verd Editorial. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822383574 Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203-214. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464 (Original work published 2018) Rogoff, I. Turning. e-flux journal, n. 0, nov. 2008. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/00/68470/ turning Sheikh, S. (2009). Objects of Study of Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on Artistic Research. Art & Research, 2(2), 1-8. Wang, Q., Coemans, S., Siegesmund, R., & Hannes, K. (2017). Arts-based methods in socially engaged research practice: A classification framework.Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2(2), 5–39. https://doi.org/10.18432/R26G8P