Teachers, artistic creativity and social engagement: challenges and opportunities with pre-service teachers

Education for social engagement is one of the main conditions in order to strengthen a deliberative and democratic society. The contributions of pedagogy and social sciences to this purpose are well known and object of a wide and rich debate. However, other fields such as visual arts can also convey a great potential when it comes to face the challenge of educating for social engagement. In this paper we will summarize some debates in art regarding the concept of commitment in contemporary culture. Some of these ideas have nowadays a remarkable influence on the spontaneous visual creativity, which is so popular among young people, and widely spread in the Net. Many recent approaches in the field of art education are precisely oriented to social contents. Therefore, we will briefly analyze the challenges that these contributions pose to the teacher training process. In the last paragraphs of this paper, we will summarize a case study research in the context of a teacher training program. Our aim is to evaluate how the participants experienced the possibility of using art to promote social engagement and the meaning that such experience had for them. We can observe that, during the project, art was used as an effective tool to convey social inquiry and awareness. The participants linked the experience to relevant aspects of their professional training.