ART EDUCATION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION. ANALYSIS OF IBERO-AMERICAN CURRICULA FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

In an increasingly diverse and intercultural society, it is essential that schools encourage students to be able to understand the point of view of other people, so that the concept of "others" can become a "we", and for this purpose art education is an ideal space thanks to its ability to build imaginaries and ways of seeing the world, while at the same time questioning our own conceptions and prejudices. This research has analyzed the approach to arts education in the curricula of early childhood education in ten Latin American countries in order to detect and assess whether they contemplate it from a transformative orientation, understood as one that generates a space for reflection on different worldviews, as well as individual and collective identity to generate more egalitarian social practices. For this purpose, a content analysis of the ten curricular proposals under study was carried out using Nvivo software. Following the literature, the objectives of arts education were divided into four categories: academic, expressive, disciplinary-communicative and transformative. Subsequently, the results were triangulated through 25 interviews with experts in the discipline from different countries. The results indicate that arts education in the curricula analyzed is mostly justified by a communicative-disciplinary model, although all of them include some specific aspects for a transformative arts education. Three aspects to improve for the future are detected: to strengthen the transformative approach in the arts, which is frequently located in other areas linked to knowledge of the natural and social context; to improve the concretion of the transformative artistic elements in the competencies and learning outcomes, given that they frequently disappear at this level and, finally, the interviewees point out the need to reinforce arts education in teacher training and the process of curricular implementation.