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

FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO SEMIOTICS
the Lgr 62, students “should primarily be allowed to create freely without
any connection to the rest of the curricu l um (p. 312).” They should become
acquainted with a variety of materials and techniques, with some especial ly
preferred ones such as tempera instead of water colour, charcoal and soft
pastels instead off pencils.
The legacy of child psychology
It is difficult to understand the transformation of art education in Sweden
from represen tation to free creative expression without relating it to the
growing prestige of psycho logy (Åsén, 1982). Since children were increasingly
conceived as unique with a personality of their own, teachers were
encouraged to observe the psychological development of each child and to
offer materials that would fit his or her needs. In order to serve these needs,
a great variety of materials was prescribed. But teachers also had to acquire
some basic knowledge of psy chology.
In a Swedish official report on art education, published in 1956, the committee
estab lished that knowledge in the psychology of art was still on a
pre-scientific level (SOU 1956: 13). Many issues remained to be settled, e.g.
What are the roles of emotion and cognition in the aesthetic experience
What is the relationship between students’ understanding of art and their
studio work The committee advocated a “carefully designed research programme”
involving art teach ers in the role of setting up experiments and
supplying empirical data. As a result of the re port, the psychology of art was
introduced as a separate subject in the educa tion of art teach ers. It was first
taught by Marita Lindgren-Fridell, who held a licentiate (and later doctoral)
degree in art history. 6
The time was not ripe for starting a research programme, however. In
1971, Anders Almgren at the De part ment of Art History, Uppsala University,
published the first Swed ish doctoral thesis in art education: Die umgekehrte
Perspektive und die Flucht achsen perspektive [The Inverted Perspective and the
Vanishing-Axis Perspec tive]. Already in the first sentence, Almgren (1971)
lets the reader know that he is an art teacher. He goes on to de scribe the
parallels that he has found between his students’ representation of space
and that of me die val artists. The purpose of his scholarly work is to identify
and investigate relation ships between spatial representation in children’s
draw ings and the way in which artworks from different historical epochs
and different parts of the world represent space.
6 Lindgren-Fridell was for 25 years the curator of Konst i Skolan [Art in the School], which organized
travelling art exhibitions; see Lindgren-Fridell, 1984.
40 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION