Questions before words An Educational Space, a Stimulating Space

Abstract

An Educational Space, a Stimulating Space is a project by the Educational Sciences Faculty at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, which has been developed through the collaboration of university lecturers, the Galician Center of Contemporary Art and teachers. This project poses the question: What do we understand by an educational space This question is posed in order to initiate a community work process that is formative, artistic and educational. This process is formative because it means a shared reflection upon the concept of public space as a shared space. It is educational because it does not involve just the group class (90 students), but every faculty student and teacher in order to discover the different faculty building spaces. Working on educational spaces and how they are perceived, lived and used is a way of encouraging a collective, intergenerational agreement to live together. And it is artistic because it highlights the need to experiment with teaching as a process of artistic creation in which we can understand and put into practice creativity as a tool of transformation into reality: liberating arts from being a representation of things and transforming them into action, into direct, active participation. In this article, we propose educational photoactivism as a line of artistic action and research for teacher training. This approach is targeted to reflect on the situations involved in teachers' work by means of the narrative, suggesting the power of photography. Educational photoactivism favours a type of spiral learning on the part of the trainee teachers, because there is a constant flow of ideas, hypotheses, opinions and photographic interpretations from the teaching point of view.