Portrait of the artist as a teacher

The project proposed by Nita Stoica within the Energy Scholarship! is part of a larger research effort carried out together with Delia Popa within the artistic group ART ROSA (artistic group established in 2024 in Oradea). ART ROSA aims to bring to the forefront an insufficiently known and valued cultural actor in contemporary Romanian society: the artist/artist/artistx-pedagogue, that category of artists who are active both on the art scene and in formal and/or informal educational spaces , bridging the two fields in a critical and innovative way. Through investigative and speculative research methods, and through media related mainly to New Media and digital art, ART ROSA contributes to the diagnosis, but also to the change through art in education in Romania. The project is part of the Investigative Pedagogy study of the ART ROSA group.

Investigative pedagogy is that pedagogy that is based on exploration, investigation and discovery. It is a type of pedagogy used sporadically within some school activities, and especially extracurricular ones, which involves: self-organization, collection and verification of data, longer duration of time, openness to the possibility of failure/unsuccess, and an ample presentation of discoveries. Exactly this educational niche, almost impossible to include in the structure of the current Romanian school environment and curriculum, is or can be occupied by artists-pedagogues, who, being involved in the educational system and actively participating in the artistic scene, can play a unique role in education . They straddle the two fields, approach pedagogy in a creative and fluid manner, and borrow tools from the field of art into that of pedagogy, using art critically and education as an experimental field.

Within the project, video portraits of teaching artists will be made. The investigation consists in the search for those clues and evidence that attest that investigative pedagogy is an unnamed approach to the work of these artist-pedagogues, who, thanks to their involvement in the contemporary art scene, have a holistic vision of art and education. Under the pressure of the systemic crisis and the inconsistency between the children's needs and the school curriculum, the cruel and real situation creates new approaches as a direct reaction, as a reaction to concrete situations, as solutions for and solutions for real people. The video portraits will compose the image of areas of testing, risk, vulnerability, professionalism and especially care that are part of the teacher's identity. The project will consist of conducting interviews that will later form the basis of a series of video works. Using the interview and video art as a research method on investigative pedagogy, the present project aims to outline a number of at least 3 portraits-interviews of some artist-pedagogues from various urban and rural areas of Timiș. By means of standardized questions addressed to these professionals, from different generations, and with different artistic credos, the project will question the extent to which this type of pedagogy is used in school and extracurricular artistic activities, and will also reveal which the methods and principles, the values ​​and last but not least, the emotional involvement and artistic know-how that these important actors bring to the children.

This project was powered by an Energie! Creative Grant awarded by the Municipality of Timișoara, through the Center for Projects, within the Power Station component of the National Cultural Programme "Timișoara – European Capital of Culture in the year 2023".