Contributos da disciplina de Educação Visual para a construção do imaginário visual da Açorianidade

Abstract

The following report is the culmination of two years of the Master's in Visual Arts Education in the 3rd cycle of Basic Education and Secondary Education, a collaboration between the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Porto. This text is mainly about the internship experience at the Tomás de Borba Basic and Secondary School, on Terceira Island in the Azores, during the 2024/2025 school year, where I had the opportunity to follow the work of different seventh and eighth-grade classes in the Visual Education discipline, under the guidance of the school's cooperating teacher. Developed over five chapters, this report also details the pedagogical proposal that I had the opportunity to accompany with one of the seventh-grade classes. The didactic unit arose from a certain discomfort I felt during the first months of the internship, faced with the absence of references linked to the students' terri- tory, the Azores archipelago. From a critical perspective on a crystallized Azorean visual imaginary, associated with an idea of the region's "touristification," the stu- dents printed a postcard that reflected their subjective conception of "Açorianida- de" (Azorean identity), using the engraving technique. The common denominator throughout this report is the identification of certain hegemonies, and how it is possible to find practices within the school that can subvert them. This text is also, in some way, a record of a journey of thought, which marks a personal maturation surrounded by expectations and anxieties about teaching practice. In addition, the report ultimately provides a small portrait of the state of education in the Azores, which is currently experiencing a phase of euphoria in the use of digital tools, formally assuming a new normativity, based on new tech- nologies. The report concludes with a speculative mood, attempting to project into the fu- ture the possibility of an Azorean Visual Arts teacher, sensitive to the different particularities of a territory of an archipelagic nature.