‘Education is the starting point of societal change’

After a first orientation year, Fabiola Camuti is now officially appointed by HKU as professor (‘lector’) Critical Creative Pedagogies on 16 January 2025. Her professorship will investigate how art education can be better aligned with the current needs and challenges in society.

Art education as catalyst

Fabiola Camuti was a new face at HKU this year, after finishing her postdoc research at ArtEZ, where she studied non-hierarchical methods of education. In January 2024, she came to Utrecht to start her exploration of the educational systems of HKU. On 16 January, she was appointed as professor of Critical Creative Pedagogies within the research domain Creative Making Processes and Learning. The central question of this new professorship: how and what must we teach in art education to ensure that artists, designers and performers can make a relevant contribution to the challenges of today’s society? “If you want to bring about change in society, the educational domain can be a very powerful instrument for this,” Camuti explains. “The political and social impact of education is often underestimated, but it is often where transformations begin.”

Personal stake

Questioning the norm will be the leitmotiv in this professorship, and this is rooted in her DNA. Camuti tells the story of her great grandmother: in fascist Sicily right after World War 1, she became pregnant while having an affair with a married man. Despite the social exclusion this brought upon her, she decided to keep the child: Camuti’s grandmother. And as soon as the law permitted it, she changed the ‘bastard name’ Aquila, which used to be mandatory for any child born out of wedlock, into Camuti. In the traditional system that name would have died out by now, because her father never had a son. Yet he did have a daughter, who also managed to escape from the conventions: she founded a queer household with two mothers and one son, bearing the name Camuti. Every day, it can be felt how the heteronormative culture permeates everything, even though it has gotten out of date. “In many aspects, I have a personal stake in doing this research,” Camuti explains.

Critical pedagogy

Is our educational system actually attuned to our current situation, in which we aspire to inclusive, open-minded and equal treatment of each other? In this spirit, the professorship ‘Critical Creative Pedagogies’ builds forth on the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, who encourages critical thought, the scrutiny of power structures, and the aiming towards social justice. Instead of telling students how things work, you can also provide them with the tools to figure it out for themselves, Camuti explains: “The art of asking questions is slowly disappearing; we jump to solutions way too quickly. Education is turning too much in a sort of corporation that is only about performing and gaining study credits. I want to create more freedom for research and reflection. Not to control students, but to empower them and enable them to take their own creativity seriously.” Over the last year, she formulated three research lines and six basic research questions. These are now incorporated in the professorship plan that has recently been approved. It will serve as the blueprint for her work in the coming years, in which Camuti will closely cooperate with HKU’s Platform Education, the Art In Education courses at HKU, and their lecturing researchers and students.

'I would welcome a bit more friction'

Research in Creative Education

The first research line is about long-term learning within the arts and how conducting artistic research can make a concrete contribution to this. One important question within this line: can we develop alternative research methods that are more suitable to the arts and have more social impact? Camuti: “Students at an arts academy are often scared of research, thinking that it belongs to the universities.” This misconception, in which the traditional form of research is regarded as the norm, is something she wants to get rid of. “Especially embodied knowledge and experiential knowledge can be gained and shared in so many other ways. Perhaps a performance or podcast is much better suited to investigate emotional matters. I want to bring back the joy for art students who are researching, by developing research methods that are more suited to them. And we will also investigate how these methods can be incorporated in the educational programme in a natural way.”

Creative Pedagogies of Care

The second research line, Creative Pedagogies of Care, is linked to the projects of HKU in the fields of healthcare and wellbeing. How can we integrate the artistic skills effectively and fairly into healthcare environments? And how can we make sure that, in doing so, the arts are not subjugated to healthcare, but instead create transdisciplinary partnerships based on equality? The plan is to study experiments in transdisciplinary education. One example is the studio project by HKU students at De Heygraeff, a care centre for people with multiple physical and/or mental disabilities. Here it can be studied in practice how students can best be guided and assessed when it comes to providing care to others. A second question within this line is related to the student’s and staff’s own wellbeing: is HKU actually a caring organisation in terms of study stress and work pressure?

Critical Unlearning Spaces

The third research line questions the conventional systems in yet another way. The research in Critical Unlearning Spaces is focused on how colonial, hierarchical, and non-inclusive patterns are perpetuated – and how we can abolish them. The aim is to create more fair learning environments that offer room for diversity and where everyone who participates in education feels liberated and empowered. “The word ‘unlearning’ often stirs up resistance”, Camuti adds. “But I do not mean to say that everything we’ve learned so far should be thrown overboard. I only want to investigate what must be unlearned to make the system more inclusive and equal.” The fact that this transformation of norms will stir up heated debates is even positive, according to Camuti: “At HKU, we must create more opportunities to be critical towards another, to disagree. Dutch people are very conflict-avoidant. I would welcome a little bit more friction. In art education, you need to be a little bit crazy and activistic. You shouldn’t get too comfortable, because then you will never be able to unlearn.”