Abstract:

This communication focuses on the problematization and evolution of the Art Education, Technology, and Society (AETS) course on the Master's degree in Visual Arts Teaching. We created this curricular unit in 2018 as part of the InovPed - Pedagogical Innovation competition at the University of Porto. These classes focus on multidisciplinarity and the deepening of transversal skills. Recently, AETS won the InovPed Seal Award for its reflection and renewal over five years. Since the beginning, we wanted the technological dimension to go beyond its operative character and to be questioned as an agent in society.

On the one hand, there was an expectation of technological solutions; on the other, there was also a criticism of the technologies' responsibilities in social and environmental problems. We were, therefore, looking for a course that began with students criticizing their place to be able to criticize the world. This position requires problematization and debate between teachers, students, and partners, who start by questioning their origins, positions, and places of speech and problematizing their areas of training and responsibilities in social construction.

In this constant critical engagement, AETS is a transformative course in which students and teachers put themselves on the line to explore new investigative, methodological, and technological possibilities and, fundamentally, new forms of relationship between people and worlds.

With this communication, we present a curriculum born from the intersection of the arts, education, and computer engineering. We list some of the work the students developed over four years based on an extraordinary range of proposals, technologies, and prototypes, such as videos, educational kits, zines, apps, and multimedia kiosks. The social problems and areas of intervention ranged from housing problems and university residences to climate action, social exclusion, special educational needs, identity, and gender issues. The students' methods are equally diverse and wide-ranging, crossing A/R/Tography with SCRUM, for example. The teaching methodologies and pedagogical model use collective, participatory approaches with critical feedback, enabling new relationships between people and material resources.

This communication ends with a critical reflection on the AETS, that we started on the COVID-19 pandemic. Naturally, this contingency and the critical nature of the course allowed it to problematize its own models, technologies, and social consequences in the event itself. This experience greatly influenced the dynamics and critical view of technology and art education, in which technological innovation cannot be disconnected from its pedagogical and social effects.

The history of forms of knowledge allows us to see the separation between humans and nature, mind and body, theory and practice, hierarchies and subordinates due to intellect. A way of thinking and doing constitutes a vision and construction of a world, subordinating and excluding other ways of knowing and relating. This model of knowledge has become hegemonic and deals with social and environmental problems from a technical viewpoint. Is techno-promise a solution or a problem? Questioning technology in social and ecological contexts doesn't mean denying it; on the contrary, it means reframing it in a power-knowledge relationship that transforms society.

Keywords:

Arts education, course unit, pedagogical innovation.