Dr Beatriz Acevedo is an artist and educator passionate about exploring the intersections between creativity and learning and teaching. She believes in the power of art and beauty to transform lives and enhance learning. Beatriz is not an art teacher, but for 20 years she has taught in management schools and academic development. Her life-purpose is to rekindle and activate the creative talents of students, educators and communities to empower them to live beautifully and in a sustainable manner.
Beatriz is inspired by Paulo Freire’s idea of education as a tool for social empowerment. As a student in Colombia, she became aware of her own privilege and she took a gap year to work with indigenous communities and try to make a difference. She realised that formal education can exclude other ways of knowing, and she started to experiment with art and creativity as a way of decolonising education. She was encouraged by her mentor Dr Gustavo González to lead projects such as Option Colombia/Reunirse, designed as “social years” for students to work and learn with communities.
After finishing her PhD at the University of Hull, Beatriz joined Anglia Ruskin University in 2008, where she found a supportive community for her experiments. She has championed action learning and art-based methods in education, by designing modules where students use drawing and other creative methods to develop skills in environmental management while reducing their own carbon footprint. This notion of a creative action learning is further developed in GoGreen, designed with the National Union of Students (NUS), where students facilitated environmental practices in voluntary organisations across the East of England, through beauty, imagination and creativity. Ultimately, Beatriz aims at merging art and education. Her RawTag project, co-founded with eco-artist Carmen Lamberti, invites students to reflect on their consumption habits, interrogate the supply chain and act responsibly. They also create poems, collages or posters, which are included in RawTag art installations exhibited nationally and internationally.
Beatriz’s journey is a story of experimentation, failures and courage to follow her passion: to make education into a form of art that can change the world.