Visual culture and small narratives as challenges for arts education

Abstract

The reflections presented in this article emerged from the seminar “Dialogues between art education and the challenges of the XXI century”, which took place in July 2014 in Santiago, Chile. In that encounter we discussed the challenge posed by the social, cultural, political and economic factors that influence and mediate arts education, both in formal and non-formal contexts of education. From there, the experiences narrated by the academics who contributed to the seminar led us to rediscover the approach known as visual culture and the notion of small narratives and to take up the challenge of rethinking these in our current times, which are characterized by new ways of understanding the arts in education and new proposals about the place they should occupy. The article starts by reflecting on visual culture and its role in arts education. It then retrieves and makes visible certain small narratives that, like other arts education projects, promote other kinds of knowledge, pedagogical relations and ways of understanding the arts in education.