Graffiti: un proyecto de trabajo desde la investigación-acción

Abstract

The work project presented here was carried out by students of the subject entitled “Didactics of Catalan”, which they studied in their 3rd year of teacher training at the UJI in Castellón (Spain).

The project was based on a critical constructivist approach, in which the curriculum is understood to be a historical and social construct. Different authors show how there is a relationship between theory and facts: the theoretical frameworks act as a set of filters that condition the way reality is viewed.

A number of studies conducted in action-research show how the materials used in class are never ideologically neutral. Many different studies have provided evidence to show that textbooks are still one of the educational resources most widely used by teachers. Their contents are political products that attempt to reproduce the “culture” that the social groups and classes that are in power seek to legitimise. Moreover, they are an important source of income for publishing houses, which are obviously interested in making a profit, and this is linked with a fundamental problem, namely what kind of activities do we want to work on?

Our initial hypothesis was that the graffiti that appeared like tattoos all over our city could be used to describe what issues were troubling different subcultures and what relationship there was with the legitimised knowledge.

Finally, we came to the conclusion that any subculture conceals far more than just colours and letters within its graffiti. The type of pedagogic model and the cultural contents that are offered by textbooks, as well as the selection and sequencing of the contents that appear within them, have little or nothing to do with the real world surrounding these boys and girls.