Aurelio Castro-Varela’s research while affiliated with University of Barcelona and other places

Recent education policy debates in Europe focus on adapting European education systems to modern societal needs, emphasizing competency-based education to cultivate personal fulfillment, employability, active citizenship, social cohesion, and lifelong learning. Notably, digital and sustainability competencies are regarded as pivotal for building sustainable societies. Within this context, arts education assumes significance because of its experiential nature, engaging learners not only intellectually but also emotionally and ethically. This article explores how teacher educators can provide quality arts education that embraces sustainable pedagogies through digital technologies. It delves into teacher educators’ perspectives on the challenges and opportunities presented by digital technologies when teaching arts courses online. Conducted as part of the European-funded project ‘Critical Arts Education for Sustainable Societies,’ this study involved interviews with 25 academics from five European countries. Key challenges identified include converting course content for online delivery, ensuring access to high-quality resources, or maintaining students’ active involvement in the online learning process. Conversely, educators adapted arts education by revising teaching methods through digital technologies and developing new materials to promote inclusivity, engagement, participation, and action. Implications offer guidance to arts educators on how to reconfigure their role when delivering arts courses online.

Montjuïc is a long flat-topped hill overlooking the harbor of Barcelona from the southeast border of the city. From 1915 onwards, it underwent a profound transformation turning it into the site of the 1929 International Exhibition. This article revolves around this turning point, examining the aesthetic role of infrastructures in delivering pleasure on the hill before and during the dazzling, monumental display that characterized the event. The sociocultural practices at play in Montjuïc before its re-urbanization are thus recalled and considered in terms of their environmental and bodily features, utterly different from the visual journey later offered within and around the Exhibition venue. I delve into these two regimes of pleasure by theorizing their material forms as functional to and expressive of specific ways of having fun. Consequently, this enquiry concerns the ambient conditions, sensorial landscapes and architectural elements through which pleasure took shape in Montjuïc from the mid-nineteenth century to 1936.

This action seeks to encourage collaborative learning among students in the degrees of Fine Arts, Pedagogy, Social Education, Primary Education Teacher and Early Childhood Education Teacher, by promoting collaboration and active participation in through creative strategies. This paper shows how the application of creative methods, within collaborative learning, improves accountability, role distribution, problem solving, and reflection on the learning process in college students.

In this article, I consider how cartographies have become a onto-methodological approach that seeks to produce, rather than represent, the world that they are enacting. Going beyond Alfred Korzybski’s famous axiom that ‘the map is not the territory,’ my point is that the map can shake up the territory. This shift is discussed in relation to the post-qualitative research project How Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Addressing Social Change, which focuses on mapping places and spheres that function as a source of knowledge and experience for thirty educators. The cartographic objects they composed around their learning trajectories became a space for rethinking and reconnecting domains that schools often keep strictly separate. Thus in this case the maps worked as a flat terrain where different layers met and linked outside of traditional hierarchies, which ignore for example corporeality and affects in favour of cognition or formal knowledge.

Desde el proyecto de investigación APREN-DO, deseamos asumir un planteamiento capaz de producir un tipo de conocimiento nuevo y por ello decidimos producirlo de una forma distinta mediante cartografías. La cartografía es una estrategia de investigación con trayectoria en la investigación educativa. Sobre esta temática, destacamos las cartografías como espacios de investigación para explorar las trayectorias de aprendizaje de los profesores o el discurso cartográfico es una herramienta valiosa para la teoría y la investigación educativa.

En mi investigación doctoral, titulada Estética de la proyección audiovisual. Asamblea, ficción y derecho a la ciudad en Poble Sec, Barcelona, exploré la práctica estética y pedagógica de dos colectivos surgidos tras el Movimiento 15M: el Cinefòrum de la Assemblea de Veïns i Veïnes de Poble Sec y el Taller de Ficció. Los dos empleaban la proyección de imágenes como principal herramienta de sus actividades, y lo hacían además mediante un dispositivo fluido y móvil que les permitía circular por diversos puntos de un mismo barrio. Miembro activo en ambos casos de estudio, el seguimiento etnográfico que llevé a cabo de sus respectivos devenires trataba de esclarecer un modo de existencia en común a través del “agenciamiento” (Deleuze y Guattari, 1988) de elementos humanos y no-humanos que lo sostenía y de la política sociomaterial que le daba forma. Sin embargo, al término de la escritura de la tesis empecé a valorar que el papel de los afectos había sido crucial en la constitución y desarrollo de tales agenciamientos, a la vez que desatendido en cierta medida por mi investigación. Esta presentación busca restituir esa falta a partir de autoras como Anna Hickey-Moody (2019), Lauren Berlant (2012) o Elizabeth de Freitas (2018). Concretamente, esta última ha calificado como “transindividual sympathy” al “proceso por el que se deviene otro sin borrar al otro” (p. 6). Se trata del ensamblaje afectivo de una serie de personas y cosas cuyas capacidades para obrar o modificar una situación resultan, y se mantienen, heterogéneas. O, en definitiva, de un hacer y sentir conjunto (es decir, alentado por otros y junto a otros). Ahora bien, ¿cómo se puede reconocer ese proceso en términos etnográficos y políticos? ¿Cuáles son sus rastros y sus evidencias, sus intensidades y sus modos de aparecer, sus aperturas y sus límites?

This paper discusses the main aspects of an ethnographic approach to the Occupy Poble Sec Cinema Forum in Barcelona, Spain, and the difficulties of using participant observation, in which vision is still dominant, in this setting. The methodological challenge stemmed from the ‘native’ position of the researcher – a member of the Forum’s organising group – and the sensory nature of the case study, which displaced the pre-eminence of visual inquiry. Listening attentively, rather than watching, became the main method of studying the Forum’s film screenings. The paper then contextualises these screenings as a pedagogical site emerging through a mobile technological apparatus and a relational context shaped by a logic of care. Lastly, the collective learning which this activity gave rise to is analysed as an event whose newness was based on a more-than-human assemblage of elements and also on the experiences and perspectives of those involved.