PerFormArte: Contributions of Performance to Teacher Education from a Critical Perspective on Public Policies in Colombia

Abstract

The PerFormArte experience analyzes how performative practices can become pedagogical tools for training critical teachers. From a Colombian perspective, the study examines the tensions between official teacher training policies and artistic experiences that emerge as spaces for resistance and collective reflection. It uses the PerFormArte methodological device, which integrates the artist's book, understood as a visual and narrative creation, together with the performative action “Freire's confessional” and the “clothesline of experience”, a strategy of collective memory. In this way, the authors develop a process of research in which artistic creation and pedagogy are intertwined to question normative frameworks and hierarchies of knowledge. The results reveal four central dimensions of the experience: pedagogical autonomy, didactic fears, pedagogical disobedience, and normative tensions. These dimensions reveal how performance can decolonize teacher training and promote critical thinking, fostering new forms of power and knowledge in the classroom. This article proposes understanding performance not only as an artistic resource, but also as a political pedagogical act that promotes liberating teacher training consistent with Freirean thinking and Southern epistemologies.