This article aims to reflect on how the practices of welcoming a new visual arts teacher in Portuguese public schools promote exclusionary narratives that are naturalised through language. That being said, based on the author's memory of her first teaching placement,  the aim is to analyse how, in this first contact that the teacher has with their new professional context, they are presented with a normative discourse regarding their role in the school machinery (Varela & Alves-Uria, 1992), presupposing an adaptation to this place and a nullification of everything that may be foreign to it.  

At the beginning of the text, the author shares her firsthand experience as a  new visual art teacher in a Portuguese public school, through her memories, recounting the entire ritual involving entering the school building, her introduction at the reception, the office and the management of the public institution, accompanied by a description of the different verbal and physical interactions of the various agents who were part of that moment. This description raises questions about how the teacher is addressed and affected during this ritual, exploring the feeling of strangeness fuelled by the idea of not belonging in that space or feeling ostracised. Based on this questioning of the boundary between the person outside that environment and the agents who are part of it, the concept of stranger is constructed.

The idea of strangeness is conceived from a position between places, which is formalised through a movement from the outside to the inside, that is, a feeling of strangeness empowered by the unfamiliarity of the languages with which the subject is confronted and subsequently materialised in their body, reflecting on their mode of action within the school space. In this case, the stranger becomes the teacher who is external to the school they wish to integrate into and, to this end, begins to naturalise the discourses and practices presented to them in this first moment of contact with the terrain. However, what possibilities emerge from the moment the teacher remains in this place of strangeness, in turn deviating from the normativity imposed by that space?

By considering these possibilities based on the author's experiences, the text draws attention to ways of doing and saying, that is, behaviours, verbal and non- verbal actions, understanding how these languages structure discourses of power that naturalise hegemonic practices among school agents, which reinforce exclusionary and discriminatory discourses within the school environment and systems. These ways of doing and saying are named through the interactions that the author recounts, exploring from these modes the way in which expectations regarding her place as a visual arts teacher are presented to her. These expectations are framed by the ways in which they address her, taking into account her way of acting as a foreign body, which compromises the construction of the figure of the teacher as a representative of the Portuguese state.

After framing how these ways of doing and saying construct a discourse on the figure of the visual arts teacher, a claim is made for strangeness as a form of resistance to the naturalisation and reproduction of practices by visual arts teachers in public schools. This claim defends the need for a constant strangeness of the teaching subject in the school space, as well as their practices and languages, with the aim of constructing a critical action within the school that promotes an inclusive school space of constant learning for all agents involved, through constant questioning of what is considered normal and what is considered strange.

This article is based on ongoing doctoral research entitled “Policies of Estrangement: Practices of resistance and reinvigoration of teaching agency” (2024.00945.BD), funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The author’s writing uses autoethnography as a method to reflect on the complexity of the relationship between visual arts teachers and the place where they carry out their professional activity. This method, combined with a review of the literature on teaching agency, the idea of the stranger and language, aims to reflect surgically on an episode common to all teachers who teach in Portugal – their placements in public schools – with the aim of understanding how everyday moments in the profession contribute in some way to the solidification of discriminatory structures that promote exclusion in education. Throughout the text, the author's dialogues are analysed, along with the words, contexts and modes of action in a professional interaction that could potentially be seen as simple. However, what this careful analysis reveals is that words, like gestures, convey a political stance and reproduce historical narratives about what it means to be a visual arts teacher and how the school institution produces docile subjects. In addition to the autoethnography and literature review that form the basis of this text, dialogue is analysed as an institutionalised discursive event. This analysis is developed based on the etymology of the word 'stranger' and its symbolic nature in the Portuguese context, framed by a critical discourse analysis methodology, which aims to look at the institutional power networks among school agents to verify how a micro perspective can influence a macro perspective on teaching. The triangulation between autoethnography, literature review and critical discourse analysis allows the author of this article to look at the event under analysis from different perspectives. These three methods help the text to relate the author's experience as a subject while analysing and writing about her object of analysis. On the other hand, the literature review informs how this analysis is constructed from a historical point of view on the figure of the visual arts teacher and clarifies, through critical discourse analysis, how the language inherent to the object of study reproduces institutional narratives that reinforce logics of exclusion within public schools.

The conclusions resulting from the analysis of the institutionalised discursive event, drawn from the author's memory and experiences, are organised around the main question that structures the text, which is: What possibilities of actions does the visual arts teacher activate when acting as an outsider and rejecting the normativity of discourses that exist in the school? That said, after analysing the institutionalised discursive event in conjunction with the literature review, it is concluded that the idea of estrangement as a critical practice of resistance to a hegemonic discourse can enable a continuous transformation of visual arts teachers through the unlearning of patriarchal, Eurocentric, colonial and heteronormative structures. This unlearning, generated through the reappropriation of strangeness, aims to propose an action and positioning of visual arts teachers through a reparative reading (Sedgwick, 2003) of the discourses that can make them strangers to their professional practice. The conclusion of this article acknowledges the complexity of normative discourses that we encounter in schools, but suggests reclaiming the place of the stranger as a place for political action within the school. Deconstructing the discourses of power hidden in everyday school rituals opens up the possibility of thinking about ways to transform and act on this same discursive reality from the perspective of the stranger. The stranger is presented as a tool to make the school environment more inclusive for all agents involved in that environment, critically questioning what is considered normal and how that normal affects those who are part of that space.

Ahmed, S. (2004). Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(2), 25-42. Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (2008). A reprodução. Elementos para uma teoria do sistema de ensino. Editora Vozes. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. Derrida, J. (2003). Anne Dufourmantelle convida Jacques Derrida a falar da Hospitalidade [entrevista] (A. Romane, Trans.). Editora Escuta. Eribon, D. (2007). Returning to Reims (M. Lucey, Trans.). Semiotext(e). Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. Is there no alternative? Zero Books. Foucault, M. (1999). A ordem do discurso. Aula Inaugural no Collège de France pronunciada em 2 de dezembro de 1970 (L. Sampaio, Trans.). Edições Loyola. Foucault, M. (2008). As palavras e as coisas: Uma arqueologia das ciências humanas (3.ª ed., tradução de M. de M. Oliveira). Martins Fontes. Garcés, M. (2023). Novo Iluminismo Radical. Orfeu Negro. Jaquet, C. (2023). Transclass: A theory of social non-reproduction. (G. Elliot, Trans.). Verso. Le Guin, U. (1985). She Unnames Them. The New Yorker, 21 January 1985. PDF available at https://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2013_01.dir/pdf4gQ1dofjT0.pdf Le Guin, U. (2022). A ficção como cesta. Uma teoria e outros textos (S. Gonçalves, Trans.). Dois dias Edições. Lorde, A. (1984). The transformation of silence into language and action. In Sister Outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 40-44). Crossing Press Marx, K. (2004). Trabalho Estranhado e propriedade privada In Manuscritos Econômico-Filosóficos (J. Raníere, Trans.) (pp. 79-89). Editora Boitempo. Preciado, P. B. (2023). Eu sou o monstro que vos fala [Relatório para uma academia de psicanalistas]. Cadernos PET-Filosofia, 22(1), 278–331. https://doi.org/10.5380/petfilo.v221.88248 Sedgwick, E. (2003). Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you. In Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity (pp. 123–151). Duke University Press. Varela, J., & Álvarez-Uría, F. (1992). A maquinaria escolar. Teoria & Educação, 3(6), 68–96.