Abstract:

One of the most innovative aspects of the new education projects conducted within the European Higher Education framework, is the focus in the acquisition and development of competences by the student in teaching-learning processes. The “competence” concept makes reference to a dynamic combination of knowledge and abilities, acquired or developed by the student along a learning process. These competences should enable to understand, know how to act and how to be in certain situations, both throughout the working career and the personal and social emotional live.
In the new academic curricula, the aimed results from the learning process are expressed as surpassing minimum requirements for the recognizance of such learning. This way of expressing results has a social dimension because they have been elaborated after consulting both internal and external referents from the academic and labour world. Hence, it takes into account the requirements for the integration in the labour world, citizenship or lifelong learning in the specific discipline which is the case. Competences and learning results are related and inform one another in a dynamic environment of social and knowledge change.
The incorporation of the performing arts – drama, dance, cinema- to the European framework of higher education represents an opportunity for doing a profound reflection about the scenic fact, in relation with the social dimension of the students’ competences and capabilities development. In this sense, the interdisciplinary perspective of visual studies orientate the approach of the artistic, scenic and cultural objects from the point of view of the social life of the visible phenomena and of the act of looking in itself, loaded with history and relation rules and social interaction. The “visual” concept shall not be reduced to the visible facts but should also be covering its pragmatic dimension, hence, including the social factors implied in every perception situation. Objects are not steady meaning containers, they can convey different senses depending on the look that unveils them, ergo, the scopic regime and discursive framing from which they are appreciated and interpreted. Furthermore, setting the focus of attention on the spectator, the scenic fact gets a communicative dimension that involves all kinds of strategies meant to interpellate the observer’s look. From this communicative perspective, socio-semiotics propound an inquiry of the sense not as a thought faced with reality, but moreover, as the result of a negotiation among subjects, of inter-subjective practices that put into circulation the meaning of the objects.
The intersection of semiotics and pedagogy with the performing arts teaching is done in the area of sense production. This is done in such a way that semiotics account for the construction and circulation processes of the sense of the artistic and cultural objects. On the other hand, pedagogy is in charge of the way that the subject takes access to the areas of sense and is related and how it relates to them in a critic and creative way. Competence formation in artistic education requires paying attention to this semiotic turn of the visual. This visual turn implies that every scenic fact can be analysed as a strategic arrangement of sense mechanisms in scenic and cultural artefacts which are executed throughout discursive arrangements socially and historically shaped among inter-subjective relations.

Keywords:

Competence, performing arts, visual studies.