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

FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO SEMIOTICS
Goës used drawing as a way of perceiving, reflecting upon, and restruc turing
a subject area. In 1916 he started, together with a writing colleague, Gottfried
Sjöholm, to produce a series of illustrated textbooks for a new subject
in the primary school – Hem bygds kun skap [Ger. Hei mat kunde; Eng. approx.
Social Studies] – that in te grated local his tory, geography and folk lore. The
curric ulum demanded that students should be invol ved in practical exercises.
Among these, Sjö holm and Goës said, draw ing was “the kind of exercise
that never can be dis pens ed with”. The last edition of one of their popular
books was published in 1960.
The method introduced by Sjöholm and Goës was modelled after the
brief sketch that step by step is developed into more details and sharper
contours. Students were en cour aged to reproduce the essential form of an
object in simple geometrical shapes. Some times a sketch was drawn on the
blackboard, explained by the teacher and then erased. On other occa sions
an object was shown for a short interval. The student then drew it from
memo ry. Later on, the object was brought forward again and was compared
with the drawing. Large dis crepan cies were rectified. During this process,
the typical form was identified and unne ces sary details were sorted out.
Sjöholm and Goës not only developed the visual imagination of children
at a time when pictures of local phenomena were not as readily available as
they are to day. Goës also developed a set of graphic conventions that made
it possible for stu dents and teachers to make their own representations of
different phenomena. In this he was inspired by early modernistic artists,
although he went from abstraction to nature rath er than the other way
around as the modernists did (Hansson, 1992, pp. 29-30). For several decades,
Swedish pri mary school teachers in the Sjöholm/Goës tradition engaged in
a discussion about the role of pictorial representations and drawing across
the curriculum.
Art as free creative expression
After World War II, the discussion of curriculum issues in Drawing was taken
over by art teachers seeking an iden tity as a new professional group within
the emerg ing com pre hensive school. These art spe cia l ists soon became influenced
by a type of psycho logy and educational philosophy that tended to set
up the terms “self” and “culture” as opposites. According to Peter Abbs (2003)
… nearly all the necessary resources were seen to reside in the natural self, not in the collective
culture and not in the specific art form the teacher was claiming to teach. One
released; one did not initiate, nor transmit (p. 51).
38 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION