Abstract
This research investigates the potential for global competence education in universities using the innovative educational experience Touristhmus in Reverse (TIR). The study focuses on a group of third-year degree in teachers for primary education students who engaged in an arts education project inspired by the works of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Brugge. These artists create large-scale sculptures of everyday objects that symbolically reflect cultural aspects of their installation sites. By examining the artists' cultural backgrounds and the cultural contexts of the installation locations, the project activates a dialectic tension between different cultures. This dialectic is connected to the concept of travel as an intercultural tool, where interaction between the traveler's cultural baggage and host culture leads to personal growth. TIR involves these artistic, cultural, and epistemological dimensions, promoting the acquisition of global competence. This competence enables individuals to better understand and coexist with culturally diverse societies, demanded by globalization.
TopIntroduction
Touristhmus in Reverse (TIR) is an arts education initiative born within the project Aprendemos “ENTER” Culturas 2.0. Jóvenes and EducAction contra el racismo, funded by Fundación La Caixa, in the period 2022-2023. The project was directed by the researcher Dr. Isabel Gomez Barreto, professor at the Faculty of Education of Albacete, at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. With a strong interdisciplinary character, professors from areas as diverse as Psychology, Didactics and School Organization or Physical Education, Artistic Education and Music participated in the project. This project seeks to acquire and develop skills and attitudes of a global intercultural nature, strengthening different dispositions and skills to promote intercultural sensitivity. Structured in three phases, the TIR project is located in the last phase, which seeks to incorporate transversally global education content in various participating subjects, while subsequently exposing the awareness and cultural richness actions developed. TIR was developed in the first semester of the 2022-2023 academic year, from November to January. The chapter presents the theoretical framework on which TIR is based as an agent of global competence based on intercultural arts education, objects as protagonists of knowledge acquisition, and tourism as a source of cultural exchange. The objectives of TIR and the methodologies employed are presented, as well as a general reflection on the results obtained. This chapter seeks to provide an overview of TIR at all stages of its development.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Gentrification: A phase in the development of a city in which the residents of one part of the city are forced to move to another area due to rising rents for housing and basic necessities, as well as the lack of public services for citizens, as a result of the increase in tourism in that part of the city.
Thinking Routine: Educational action that seeks to make people think deeply, while making that thinking and its conceptual and emotional relationships visible.
Object-Based Learning: Teaching and learning methodology in which objects and their qualities are the main protagonists.
Object Sculpture: Everyday object artistically represented in a volumetric and identifying form.
Touristhmus in Reverse: A concept that brings together the idea of a type of tourism that establishes intercultural bridges or isthmus (tourism + isthmus), and that inverts the usual way, it is the place of destination that comes to meet the tourist in his place of origin.
Intergraphical Connections: Process by which one has the ability to find formal and conceptual similarities between visual images from different cultures or subcultures.