Id@rt Experience: A Transnational Blended-learning Project Founded on Visual Culture

This article is the result of interchanging experiences, the Id@rt experience, among artists, educators and students from different countries and contexts that share the concept of identity as a subject matter for the artistic and educational research processes. We followed a methodological framework that combines the visual culture art education, as an approach to make and interpret the visual reality, and the blended-learning, as a tool to transform and improve the learning process. We proposed the Id@rt experience to teacher in training at the Granada University (Spain), and to student of communication and art education course at the Bologna Fine Arts Academy (Italy). The aim of this project is to develop a closer look at contemporary art, promote creativity and foster the social skills promoting new ways of communication and creation. Through this project we propose to create a synergy between the use of traditional art education methods and the new-technologies based-methods (ICT and e-learning). The evaluation results of the Id@rt experience, obtained from our observation together with focus-groups and open-end questionnaires, indicate that the participants increased their creativity and developed their social/communicative competencies, experiencing art and new technology languages and discovering the creative identity of the contemporary artist and of themselves. Projects like Id@rt experience pave the way for a new understanding and teaching of the art education and new interpretations of the contemporary art and the visual culture.