Teachers Professional Development

We start this year with a series of encounters in which students of education at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) will be visiting the museum. Together with their teachers from the Department of Art, Plastic and Visual Education, and based on the experience of the group visits, we want to create a space in which the university can work with the museum. What can the museum’s education departments contribute to the training of teachers, and vice versa; what place do art and contemporary artistic practice have in their learning experience?

Project in collaboration with the Department of Artistic, Plastic and Visual Education of the UAM Faculty of Education.

We started this line of research last year, starting with the question: What do 0 to 6 year-old children like? In order to find answers, we visited crèches and nursery schools as an exercise in observation and took away a number of clues: 

• The yoghurt lid. Remove it, ‘read’ it and put it away.
• Stick the mandarin segment stickers in unusual patterns.
• Feed other children
• Mix colours. Paint over and over with a lot of tempera paint. Until the paper breaks.
• Peel the stickers off the crayons.
• Little things. A bit of fluff, a speck. A tiny sequin on the floor that hardly anyone sees.
• Make a bracelet out of a slice of bread.
• Shiny things. Sequins and iridescent fabric. *

With a notebook filled with new actions to put into practice, we continue into this year by giving shine to this research carried out by the education department at the CA2M Museum together with the EnterArte collective. For the coming months, we will be planning new actions, internal meetings and other open activities to think about how to make the museum a softer experience and prepare to open it up to the widest range of people.

*Notes taken by Goya Batalla, member of the EnterArte collective.

This activity belongs to the line Escuela desbordada / Talleres de educación (‘Overflowing School / Education Workshops’) held by the EnterArte collective, which is a part of Asociación Civil Acción Educativa.

To take flight and hover about the school is the practice with which we begin this school year.

In order to take a breather and to get a bird’s-eye view of the year that is just beginning we have invited the artist Olga Diego to lead a performance workshop with one single objective: to defy gravity.

In this workshop we will imagine and build our own airborne device. Collectively we will undertake a prior study, make calculations, sketches, scale models, preliminary tests and then the launch. The forms and systems of this aerostat will be experimental, defined and created by participants under Olga Diego’s watchful eye.

Here, there is no such thing as failure because the workshop provides room for all possible ideas: flying, pre-flying, pro-flying, pro-failure, pre-fall, anti-flight, pre-disaster, and so on.

Each school year we organize a workshop for teachers with a performance artist, consisting of an intensive week-long project during which we create bonds of cooperation between the school and the museum as we explore issues concerning educational processes and the performativity of teaching.

In previous years we have had workshops with Los Torreznos, Tania Bruguera, Pere Faura, Itziar Okariz, Norberto Llopis, Nilo Gallego, Dora García, Aimar Pérez Galí, Luz Broto, Aitana Cordero, Jiři Kovanda, Paz Rojo and Mónica Valenciano.