What kind of knowledge does art produce, and why is it still so difficult to recognise when we try to assess it using categories developed mainly for other forms of research? This was the question from which Rui Penha, a lecturer at the School of Music and Performing Arts, developed his keynote address at the 2026 Internal Conference on Pedagogical Innovation. His reflection began with artistic research and reached a much broader subject: how we learn, teach and change through our relationships with other people and the world.
As Rui Penha showed, artistic research occupies particularly challenging territory. It is relatively easy to recognise a study of a work, a composer or an artistic practice as research, just as we recognise the development of new technologies for creative work. It has been harder to accept that artistic creation itself can produce knowledge, especially when that knowledge cannot be fully expressed as propositions, concepts or written explanations.
Much of the academic tradition has taught us to recognise as knowledge what we can state, demonstrate and convey in words. Yet everyday experience tells us that not everything we know exists in that form. Being able to explain what a pianist does does not enable us to play like one; knowing every instruction for a particular technique cannot replace the years spent working with materials, the body and the practice needed to master it. Some knowledge is built through doing, experimenting and forming relationships, and remains partly inaccessible to anyone who sees only the final result.
From this starting point, Rui Penha proposed understanding artistic research as the creation and sharing of relational knowledge. The phrase may seem abstract at first, but it becomes concrete when we consider how a work of art can change what we are able to see, feel or understand. A work does not have to explain a relationship to make it possible. It can open up a new way of relating to an experience, an object, a memory or even a part of ourselves that we had not previously been able to recognise.
This is where reflection on artistic creation meets education. When a teacher enters a classroom, they bring much more than a set of course materials. They bring the references they have gathered, the works they know, the people they have learned from, the values they have developed and a particular way of relating to knowledge. Students arrive with networks of their own, shaped by different experiences, references and ways of seeing the world.
Teaching happens where those two networks meet.
For Rui Penha, that relationship becomes truly educational only when it allows change in both directions. Teachers naturally seek to broaden students’ horizons and introduce them to things they do not yet know. But teachers must also be open to being affected by what students bring. Students’ references, the questions they ask and the ways they engage with materials can also shift a teacher’s perspective, prompting them to look differently at what they thought they knew.
This openness helps explain another of the keynote’s most thought-provoking ideas: the school as a "theatre of aspiration". There are things whose value we cannot appreciate before we encounter them. A student may meet a teacher deeply engaged with a work, a field or a practice that initially means little to them. Even without fully understanding that connection, the student may sense that there is something worth discovering. Education can create precisely these encounters, giving people opportunities to experience worlds they do not yet know well enough to desire.
In this sense, aspiration comes before certainty. We begin a journey without knowing exactly how it will change us, and only later understand why a particular experience, person or choice became important. Rui Penha connected this idea with artistic creation, which rarely begins with complete knowledge of what will be found at the end. Artists engage with materials, transform them and are transformed in turn, discovering the meaning of what they have made only in retrospect.
This is why academia can provide a particularly important space for creation and learning. Outside it, artists may be constrained by audiences, markets or the need to protect their careers, circumstances that make tried-and-tested approaches understandable. In an academic setting, there is an opportunity to create a more protected space in which to experiment, take risks, fail and abandon paths that do not lead where expected, without requiring every attempt to produce an immediate, reliable or recognisable result.
That freedom also carries a pedagogical responsibility. If teaching means passing on only what we already know, each generation can, at best, reproduce the previous one. Rui Penha stressed that students should not aspire merely to become capable copies of their teachers. They need to be able to go beyond them, bring in other references and add something to the tradition they have inherited. Through this process, teaching ceases to be reproduction and becomes a form of living continuity.
Towards the end of the keynote, the relationship between art and science emerged less as an opposition than as a possibility for complementarity. Science has extraordinarily powerful tools for focusing on, distinguishing and understanding specific aspects of reality. Art can often move in the opposite direction, bringing together what seemed separate, preserving ambiguity and engaging several dimensions of human experience at once.
Perhaps this is what makes Rui Penha's address so relevant to education beyond the arts. Learning also means acquiring new ways of relating to the world, and teaching means creating the conditions for those relationships to develop. When that happens, change rarely belongs to the student alone: the educational relationship also changes the person who teaches and what both teacher and student become able to see.