Art, body and identity for a participatory action research with afro-descendant students

Abstract

Afronteriz*s is a co-learning program (between art educators and educators of the Afro-descendant community and high school students), a collaborative action-research group that emerged in 2016 at the Artistic Residency Center of Matadero Madrid. Education is an essential tool for achieving a society in which differences are not perceive as something negative and where the problems that arise from multiculturalist approaches are not made invisible such as: denial of institutional racism, invisibility of structural conflicts, categorization of diversity, avoiding the intersectional reality and mestizo consciousness (Anzaldúa, 2004). We recognize the need for a cross-cultural education (Onghena, 2014; Ortiz, 2002), in which the diversity that we see every day in our streets becomes part of the curricula of the different levels of the system Spanish education. That is why with this close study we want to approach the results obtained from the work with racialized references, critical thinking, work with the body and identity or the analysis of art and visual culture. We present a case study in the 3rd classroom of the E.S.O PMAR of IES PRADOLONGO, in the district of Usera (Madrid). The workshops carried out have proven to be a reinforcement of the students’ self-esteem, providing them with better tools for the analysis of their social reality, favoring their possibilities of inclusion, empowerment and personal development, which allows them to act as mediators for the prevention of the conflicts that can begin in the context of the classroom-educational center.