Facultad de Bellas Artes de San Carlos

Departamento de Pintura

Programa de Doctorado
Artes Visuales e Intermedia











Tesis Doctoral

EL DIBUJO COMO DISPOSITIVO PEDAGîGICO

      Fundamentos del dibujo en la ense–anza contempor‡nea de las artes pl‡sticas

Presentado por

Philip JosŽ Rodrigues Esteves

Dirigida por

Dr. D. Francisco Sanmart’n Piquer
Dr. D. JosŽ Manuel GuillŽn Ram—n






MAYO 2011

      Abstract 
       This thesis refers to the following specific subjects: fine arts / drawing for the arts; practices and strategies on drawing teaching; drawing learning questioning; drawing exercises and its scripts; teaching environment and instructional milieu; criteria, processes and procedures on artistic drawing teaching.
       ÊKey-words: drawing, learning, strategy, exercise, script, teaching, practice, experience, plastic arts, teaching environment.Ê
       The current dissertation refers to drawing teaching practices within a fine arts teaching environment and aims to understand the conditions under which those are shaped. The research intends to analyse those conditions not only from within a set of questions related with drawing, but also, and after all, with its learning process. In order to understand the drawing as a teaching device and, in particular, the importance of practical exercises for drawing learning, one has to analyse it at the cross point of different restraints (simultaneously) committed to what is to come a contemporary experience. Conceived to sustain a teaching method, the drawing exercises reveal themselves as determinant to shape a process whose nature is, after all, a practical one. They define the scope of what should be worked in a teaching environment and, up to a point, they should allow us to obtain a global and controlled vision on a teaching strategy that is taking place there Ð as well as the loyalty of teaching practices to the subjects that were planned. Consequently, our interdisciplinary approach aims to identify the functions, techniques and tools that make such device contemporary and operative  
       Therefore, the research intends to analyse the role played by actions taken to implement the teaching practices for contemporary drawing. Drawing teaching does not include mere well identified scripts considered relevant for student training. Those scripts, designed to accomplish well defined goals depending on teaching strategies, appeal to instructional and experimental mechanisms which operate within a concrete teaching environment. As we will try to show, both the nature and the specifications of these devices (the drawing exercises) which help shaping the teaching environment (the classroom) are, however marginal and minor, indispensable if a learning practice is to be successful on contemporary artistic drawing.
       This dissertation structure can be summarized as follow: 
       The drawing teaching takes place in an educational environment which brings together rather different agents. The teaching foundations and its intelligibility are always based on factors which by themselves imply specific historical and socio-cultural frameworks (1.1), as well as a constant reassessment of its relevance within the set of formulations that are now shaping the contemporaneousnessÕs paradigm Ð whose characteristics, to start with, are important to define (1.2). 
       The artistic drawing teaching takes into account specific subjects which are, in terms of teaching methodology, developed through strategies designed to fit such a goal. However, once these subjects and strategies are acknowledged, there should be the need to reshape them within the scope of contemporary conditions, nature and legitimacy vis-ˆ-vis the plastic arts and artistic drawing teaching (2.1). But the characteristic complexity of the artistic drawing teaching is not strictly contained within the relationship between subjects and its planned distribution along a teaching strategy. Once the subjects and strategies to set up a teaching process are defined (what constitutes the curricula and its implementation), its success depends on the insertion of a third instance which effectively sustains the experimental practices on the practical aspects of drawing. There, the exercises functions of promoting the availability of a student for artistic experimentation, its playful dimension and its relationship with the idea of a game are important factors to take into consideration (2.2). Therefore, the understanding of these devices on the drawing teaching practice has to take into account those conditions that shape the teaching environment where these exercises take place (2.3); and yet, the need to understand the nature of those types of exercise: its scripts (2.4).    Moreover, and beyond this set of factors which constitutes the support for a drawing teaching practice, teaching always takes place within a well defined environment: the drawing classroom. This classroom brings together a collective body and it is there that certain events Ð often silenced and absent from the curricula Ð play an essential role on the efficiency (and, consequently, on the success) of a specific teaching approach to drawing. However, in the case of artistic practices, the classroom environment is determinant to any teaching achievement. It is a process that implies the display (it is evident, it is there, it should be ÔshownÕ), but it is also a process whose nature is not entirely explicit (as opposed to what happens on an enunciation of subjects, a presentation of a strategy or even when clarifying a script to an exercise): it implies, both for teachers and students, elaborate procedures of empathy and even osmosis (3.1).    
       Finally, within the context of that same collective body, the construction of criteria to assess and evaluate all personal experiences occurring inside a teaching progression is an integrant part of the learning process Ð proving or compromising the teaching achievement at stake (3.2). 
Note: The numbering inserted above relates to each section of the thesis dealing with the subject referred to in the text.
	








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