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

FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO SEMIOTICS
but, re fer ring to Barbara Rogoff (1994), she concludes that giving students
a great deal of freedom has to be com bined with the guidance necessary to
create a “community of lear ners.”
Art as visual communication
Although “free creative activity” was a dominant ideological trend in the
1950s and the early 1960s in Sweden, it never obtained the hegemony that it
has had in many other countries un til quite recently. In the mid-1960s, there
was a disappointment from some former iconoclasts as well as a massive,
more antagonistic critique from a group of young students at the Na tional
College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm (Konstfack), where at the
time all se condary school art teachers received their basic training.
One of the most articulate critics was Christer Romilson, a future leader
of Scandina via’s largest teacher union. In the late 1960s, he belonged to
the movement of students that was awakened politically by the Vietnam
War and went on to critici ze power elites in the uni ver sity as well as in the
society at large. Romilson (1971) argued that the definition of freedom behind
the phra se “free creativity” was a nega tive one: the absence of compul sion.
This kind of attitude can never lead to real freedom. Romilson made a comparison
with the language arts. Admittedly, the stu dent who does not study
a foreign lan guage has a kind of freedom, but the person who speaks several
for eign languages has a lot more freedom.
Romilson also questioned the attitude that any fixed teaching would be an
encroachment upon the students’ integrity. If the teacher’s role is reduced to
a caretaker for ma te rials, the only consequence will be that other influences
take over the steering of the stu dents. Students will be left at the mercy of
the enormous commercial propaganda machine – which works largely with
pictures. This flood of visual media moulds our students, Romilson said, and
it provides them with templates for their activity, both in form and content.
His conclusion is that . . .
it is only by analysing and studying the society in which we live, its construction and its
pur poses – and its pictures – that man can achieve the freedom that makes it possible
for him to work towards a consciously chosen purpose. It was this that the critics of free
creative activity considered to be the important function which the teacher of the visual
arts had to fill (Romilson, 1971, p. 5).
A young teacher at the department of art education, Gert Z Nordström,
shared this view and criticized the nar row orientation towards art in teacher
education (one year: still life, watercolour; one year: still life, gouache; two
42 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION