Arts Education and Child Empowerment: Choral Co-Creation as a Critical Pedagogy in Hybrid Learning Contexts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/mar.7.1.2026.22539Keywords:
arts-based education, student participation, social justice, children’s rights, community participationAbstract
This study presents the preliminary results of CoCREA!, an experience of choral and theatrical co-creation involving children aged 8 to 18, developed in hybrid educational contexts that bridge the General and Special Education Regimes in Llinars del Vallès (Catalonia). Grounded in a critical social pedagogy perspective, the project is based on the Non-Conventional Choral Educational Methodology (MECC), which integrates music, theatre, and emotional education through collective creative processes. Using a mixed, longitudinal, and participatory design, the study implemented pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and performative devices with evaluative functions. The results show significant improvements in musical competencies, increased motivation and artistic vocation, and notable emotional and symbolic transformations among participants. At the community level, sustained social appropriation and the consolidation of shared governance among schools, families, and artistic agents were observed. However, structural tensions were also identified that limit the model’s sustainability: institutional resistance to emotional education, curricular rigidity, scarcity of hybrid professional profiles, and weak articulation between educational regimes. The discussion interprets these tensions as evidence of the disruptive potential of co-creative art and proposes its integration as an emancipatory pedagogical practice within a more just, inclusive, and transformative education. CoCREA! does not merely produce art — it produces community, meaning, and critical citizenship from childhood onward.
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