Research in Visual Arts Education - The National Society for ...

ISSUES IN VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION
in many countries focused almost exclusively on content knowledge, i.e. the
subject matter to be taught. During the late 20 th Century, however, the
pendulum swung towards a heavy emphasis on teacher competencies and
teaching procedures defined in general terms, without reference to a specific
knowledge domain.
In his Presidential Address at the 1985 annual meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, Lee Shulman (1986) used the expression
“the missing paradigm” to pinpoint the “blind spot with respect to content”
(p. 7) that, in his opinion, characterized not only most research on teaching
but also the theoretical frameworks in which educational policies were formulated.
Shulman asked his colleagues rhetorically: “Where did the subject
matter go What happened to the content” (p. 5)
Shulman (op. cit.) developed a new framework for teacher education by
introducing the concept of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Rather
than viewing teacher education from the perspective of either content
or pedagogy, Shulman believed that teacher training programmes should
simultaneously combine elements from both of these knowledge domains.
In the present report, Shulman’s integrated concept of PCK will be used as a
touchstone to delimit the term ämnesdidaktik from what should more aptly
be termed content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, etc. 4 PCK,
says Shulman (1987),
represents the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular
topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests
and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction. Pedagogical content knowledge is
the category most likely to distinguish the understanding of the content specialist from
that of the pedagogue (p. 8).
Teachers differ from artists, art historians, art critics, or educational researchers,
not necessarily in the quality or quantity of their subject-matter
knowledge, but in how that knowledge is organized and used. For example,
experienced art teachers’ knowledge of the visual arts is structured from a
teaching perspective and is used as a basis for helping students to master
specific skills and to understand specific concepts. An artist’s knowledge,
on the other hand, is structured from an artistic perspective and is used as
a basis for broadening the field, through adding new perspectives or using
techniques in new ways.
4 Kåre Slåtten (1998) argues that ämnesdidaktik includes more than the concept of PCK, which tends to
focus on the transformation of disciplinary knowledge to representations in the classroom.
14 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION