Taking its inspiration from work conducted by an important nongovernmental organization, the article analyzes the processes by which subjectivity is produced during educational activities. This particular professionalizing experience, offered to youth on Rio de Janeiro's urban periphery, involves artistic-cultural training that conjoins elements from music, theater, and circus. In an endeavor to understand the different meanings expressed in the status of learner, the present study explores health, work, and art, borrowing from the Greek notion of 'leaner of oneself', a notion that takes these youth beyond predominant significances and turns apprenticeship into a broad range of possibilities that are continually being invented. The experience confronts and creates alternatives to the conflicts faced by youth who live on the periphery of the prevailing ways of life, which tend to format the body and the very condition of learner. These conflicts and formatting produce two non-mutually exclusive poles: Art as a marketable product and Art as a process for transforming ways of living.
subjectivity; youth; educational activities; work; health