DEGRADED BEAUTY: CONTEXTUAL ART AND LANDSCAPE EDUCATION THROUGH A PROJECT IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

Abstract

Today educational settings face the challenge of connecting the curriculum that is taught in school with the students’ reality outside the classroom. In that sense, art education can be especially relevant, allowing students to stablish affective and emotional links with this reality through a creative process. The project described in this paper promoted a creative and critical work about the degradation of the landscape in the vicinity of our secondary school. In order to internalize and to solve this problem students enrolled in music and visual arts classes worked through the paradigms of contextual art and critical pedagogy. The present text is structured around the art-based research model (Frayling, 1993; de Laiglesia, 2009), describing and conceptualizing the project and focusing in the concept of degraded beauty through four parts: context, concept, actions and publicity. After considering the teacher as a public intellectual, the object of the project was to generate a critical thinking in students from a theory-grounded perspective.