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

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
In Denmark, “child art” was never abandoned as a topic of study. Instead,
established accounts of children’s appropriation of a pictorial language
were revised. Soon after, but independent of, the publication of Brent and
Marjorie Wilson’s “Iconoclastic view of the imagery sources in the drawings
of young people” (1977), the Danish art educators Rolf Köhler and Kristian
Pedersen (1978) published a book where they criticized the famous Viktor
Lowenfeld (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1969) for not taking into consideration
the great impact of the visual culture in which children participate. Like
the article by the Wilsons, their book created a huge stir among those who
cherished the romantic view of the innocent child.
In the Nordic countries, Lowenfeld’s grand narrative of the emancipation
of the child from artful scribbles, via a growing mastery of visual realism
to the expressive qualities of early Modernism, is giving way to a variety of
smaller, less comprehensive narratives. The copies sold of the Danish translation
(1 st ed. 1971; 2 nd ed. 1976) of Creative and mental growth in Scandinavia,
declined from around 1,200 in 1984 to less than 300 in 1995/1996. Today,
artistic development is rather described as the growth of a gradually more differentiated
repertoire, with different options co-existing and being available
for different purposes, rather than replacing each other in a hierarchical order.
Process and socio-cultural approaches laid the foundation for a revival
of interest in children’s drawings in the 1990s (e.g. Hansson et al., 1991;
Andersson, 1994; Lindström, 1995; Aronsson & Andersson 1996; Aronsson,
1997). For example, Karin Aronsson & Sven Andersson (1996; Andersson,
1994) asked African and Swedish children to make drawings of classroom
life and of their future family. Their findings supported the notion of “social
scaling”; that is, social space in the drawings (relative size, distances, degree
of detailing etc.) reflected children’s hierarchies of importance.
Another mani festation of the child art revival is The cultural context
(Lindström, 2000), presenting papers from a symposium held in Vilnius,
Lithuania, which was organized by the Network of Nordic Researchers
in Visual Arts Education. In this edited volume, Aronsson & Junge and
Lindström, for example, presented cultural com parative studies of children’s
drawings in non-European cultures, such as Ethiopia, Nepal, Mongolia and
Cuba.
Marie Bendroth Karlsson (1996) studied visual arts projects in the
Swedish preschool and school. She concluded that “art activities are often
made subordinate to other goals and used as means for reaching non-artistic
goals, such as diagnostics, decoration/entertainment, concept learning
etc.” (p. 300). Elisabet Ahlner Malmström (1998) analysed communicative
54 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION