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

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
In a curriculum guide for art education in the compulsory school, Sten-Gösta
Karlsson and Staffan Lövgren (2001) refer to Gottfried Sjöholm and Axel
Goës among their sources of inspiration. They present a well-structured
thematic approach that will make art education look pretty much like any
other school subject, with objectives, assignments, home work, reflection,
interaction and assessment.
As far as curricula and syllabi are concerned, Swedish art education has
always been concurrent with, and sometimes ahead of, its time compared
to other school subjects, says Gunnar Åsén (1998). On the other hand, in
spite of new curricula, classroom activities do not seem to have changed
very much. Like the 1992 national evaluation (NU 92), the 2003 evaluation
(NU 03; Marner, Örtegren & Segerholm, 2005) found that Visual Production
dominated time in class over other aspects of the curriculum, such as Picture
Analysis and Visual Communication (Table 1).
Table 1. Activities in art lessons according to teachers in the 9th school year (age 16). Source:
Marner et al. 2005.
Section 1992 2003
Visual Production 57% 60%
Picture Analysis 11% 12%
Visual Communication 13% 12%
Aesthetic Orientation 10% 10%
Image & Environment 9% 6%
Total 100% 100%
Among the art teachers in the NU 03, there were two major conceptions of
art education. Approximately 45 % of the teachers defined visual arts (pictorial
studies) as an aesthetic-practical school subject, whereas almost the same
percentage of the teachers put communication at the core of the curriculum.
In both groups manual production was a more common classroom activity
than production by means of modern visual media. The term aestheticpractical
was introduced in 1962 but was removed in the curriculum from
1980, where all subjects were arranged in alphabetical order. However, an older
conception of an art-and-craft based (aesthetic-practical) subject seems
to have survived alongside with more recent ones, as a cultural lag. Marner et
al. (2005) even found a minority who looked upon their subject as basically
an outlet for free creative expression, hence representing a curricular conception
that was popular during the 1950s.
NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 57