In 2015, Andrea Rubio Fernández, a PhD Researcher in the History and Arts Programme at the University of Granada at the time, proposed using a sculptural pedagogical approach to educational research based in the visual arts. For her, sculpture was a research method, an expressive medium, and a kind of language. Andrea explored artistic teaching methods that can be extracted from artistic processes like sculpture in her research, and her proposal was founded from an ‘a/r/tographic’ standpoint, that is, integrating creation, educational research, and teaching together.

Her research report “Metodologías Artísticas de Enseñanza. Un enfoque escultórico para la educación artística” (Artistic Teaching Methodologies. A sculptural approach to arts education) prioritises visual discourse to account for the process of inquiry. Her research was exhibited as artistic pieces at the Faculty of Education Sciences of the University of Granada, and in her 2015 article, they are presented in the form of visual essays. Andrea and her collaborators found that “by understanding the whole learning process as a work of art, as an aesthetic experience, it necessarily generates an active and awakened learning.”

By integrating sculpture into her research into arts methodologies for teaching, she found that exciting new possibilities and proposals could be taken from conceptual educational, and artistic structures.

Images from her Doctoral thesis: Andrea Rubio Fernández. “Metodologías Artísticas de Enseñanza: Un enfoque escultórico para la educación artística.” Doctoral thesis in History and Arts, Universidad de Granada. 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/ANIAV.2015.1223