Art and education: conceiving the space of atelier as an opportunity for educational innovation

Abstract

From the Education área and the Visual Arts área, of the Catholic University of Uruguay, we create a course to nurture teachers with elements to venture into the space of the atelier, its design, and the tools it provides, for the didactic innovation. In Latin America there is little specific training in the adaptation of new pedagogies that involve artistic resources, oriented towards the development of skills related to empathy, communication, understanding of their context and respect for the environment. For this pedagogical proposal, we include some of the techniques and postulates from the Early Childhood Schools in the early 1960s, in the Italian municipality of Reggio Emilia. They are schools inspired by the socio-constructivist theory, and the valorization of a multiplicity of expressive languages of Loris Malaguzzi (Cavallini et al., 2017). The atelier is configured as a space that crystallizes learning. In Vecchi's words: “sensory perception, the taste of seduction, what Malaguzzi called the aesthetic vibration, can act as catalysts for learning, and how they can support and feed a knowledge that is not nourished only by information”. Our specific objectives was: 1) To sensitize the participants in the deconstruction of the apparent neutrality of everyday objects; 2) To reflect on the postulate to do is to think, from Richard Sennet (2013) and 3) to change the teaching role positioned as a guide and facilitator of experiences.