Learning through the Collection: An Educational Resource on the Contemporary Art Andalusian Centre Web

Abstract

The Contemporary Art Andalusian Centre (CAAC) web recently offered an educational resource called Learning through the Collection. We participated in the design and want to explain the purpose of the didactic materials. The main goal of the project is to relate the formal education curriculum and the artwork belonging to the CAAC. The didactic materials have been designed to use the works of art as a reference to develop the didactic units. Some works in the art collection have been selected and categorised into four thematic areas: sign, body, city and archives. The information about the artworks attempts to relate them into common ideas and everyday problems, and they have been tagged with topic than can appear in the scholar curriculum. The teacher and pupils can search the information by thematic areas or tags. We also designed complete didactic units to be followed in the classroom. The project is based on previous research where secondary school students from two high schools were objects of an educational project and research into their concept of art. The subjects were taught all units of visual art with the assistance of recent artwork images, in order to understand the point of view and the solutions given by the actual artist about the contents of the curriculum. The attitude of the teenagers towards the artworks changed notably, forgetting preconceptions and giving value to the ideas and reflections that recent art can offer. The experience from the research has been used by the Contemporary Art Centre of Andalusia in an educational project that offers clues to discussing different problems through its artwork.