Art (self)education for the awareness of self and other

Abstract

After 39 years working as an art teacher, initially in Basic Education (public and public schools) and later in Higher Education (UFPE), I have been discovering informal education as a teaching-learning process, considering it of great relevance for the learning of art, thinking in this possibility of self-educating and, consequently, educating the ones around. After guiding several/several students who have no experience in formal education or even in non-formal education, I identified that learning. And it was then that art(self)education appeared, an awareness of oneself and of the other through the artistic process. In this article, I bring how this term has been taking shape in my research and part of the result of these reflections I presented in Paris, in 2017. These reflections on the self in artistic production deepened in this time of pandemic, between 2020 and 2021, a time when students are at home and, therefore, I identify that they are immersed in artistic production to understand themselves, strengthen themselves and not get sick in this time of loneliness that isolation, because of Covid-19, causes. The formal art teaching, in the formation of teachers at the Federal University of Pernambuco, field that I take as my place of speech, goes beyond the classroom, whether in schools or in non-formal spaces such as NGOs, studios and others, it takes place in the very body of these teachers in training. Based on the experiences lived in the classroom and outside it, we learn and relearn to be who we are; the artistic process and creativity are fundamental elements for this art(self)education, self-formation and art learning. With it, we elaborate and re-elaborate the images that constitute us. The production of art contaminated by daily images, the contextualisation, what you feel, express, see, and the awareness of yourself and of the group with which you live... and this is how the learning of art happens in an (auto)education.