Last Tuesday, November 17, we went to Granada, where we were invited to participate as “teachers” in the seminar Work Projects in Visual Culture and Cultural Pedagogy. The seminar, coordinated by Javier Rodrigo and FAAQ, is part of the
Pedagogical Project
of
Transducers
, and is aimed mainly at teachers within the scope of regulated education, although the participation of other people interested in the matter is not only welcome, but encouraged.
As stated, Work Projects in Visual Culture and Cultural Pedagogy aims to “Understand the scope of cultural pedagogy within artistic and general education, and establish ways to design work projects based on visual culture and cultural pedagogies in specific educational contexts“; however, beyond the contents, we find interesting the proposal to turn the spaces and times of the seminar into a proactive place, from which a collective knowledge and praxis can emerge. The commitment of the organizers, which we assume as our own, is to promote and collaborate in the realization of a series of educational actions and interventions in the centers where the teachers attending the seminar usually develop their work, with the ultimate aim of incorporating them into the
Archive-Exhibition
that will take place at the
José Guerrero Center
between December 2009 and February 2010 and about which we will return in due time.
Two of the four scheduled work sessions have already taken place, and so far the sensations and perspectives seem to be progressing more than adequately. To keep up to date with the development of the seminar you can visit the project blog where we have the commitment to summarize what happened in each of the sessions.
We have already talked here a couple of times about Transducers: first when we participated in one of the sessions of another previous seminar, entitled Cultural pedagogies. Collaborative practices and network learning, which was also part of the Transducers Pedagogical Project and later with the excuse of the entry that Javier Rodrigo and FAAQ published in the Guerrero blog summarizing the trajectory of the project to date and its future development. It is significant that that first training action within the general framework of Transducers is linked to the current seminar, insofar as those who attended the first have been proposed to collaborate in the development of the educational actions that they may end up designing during their participation in this second one, together with teachers.
We insisted in those entries on the complexity of the project, and it might really seem easy to get that idea seeing the amount of actions that make it up in its entirety. However, it seems to us that the complexity of the project lies not so much in the quantity but in the way in which these actions mutually feed back in multiple directions. The essential scheme of the project is divided into three large blocks: a “
At an even more general level, and more political as well, the final bet consists precisely in refusing cultural ‘translations’, that is, to stop thinking and acting from the museum or the art center as if the contents of an exhibition should be ‘translated’ for their better understanding to those who approach their rooms, be they teachers or students. On the contrary, if we understand that objects and artistic practices are intertwined in a ‘cultural conversation’, which gives rise to multiple negotiations in different fields and from very disparate positions of power, it would be a matter of ensuring that this conversation develops in the fairest terms possible.