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

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
the outcome of his study, Lars Lindström (2002b) discusses how school can
nurture students’ creativity. A summary of the study and its implications,
published in the International Journal of Art & Design Education (Lindström,
2006), received an international research award in the name of Brian Allison.
Sociology of aesthetic education
Culture, aesthetics and school are key concepts in a project co-ordinated
by Lena Aulin-Gråhamn 1999–2003, with the support of Professor Jan
Thavenius. In reports and books, such as Kultur och estetik i skolan [Culture
and Aesthetics in School; Aulin-Gråhamn & Thavenius, 2003] and Skolan och
den radikala estetiken [School and the Radical Aesthetics; Aulin-Gråhamn,
Persson & Thavenius, 2004], the group members develop a sociological theory
of aesthetic experience. They want to show how the way in which we think
about and use the aesthetic is influenced by its institutional framework,
such as the school, the art world or the market. For a long time, conceptions
of art as being decorative and creative expression as being essentially spontaneous
came to dominate the way in which art education was thought of,
at least in the earlier years of education. This conception the group calls
“the modest aesthetics”, since its modest claims have probably contributed
to the marginalisation of aesthetic elements and perspectives in school.
The most forceful power in the contemporary aesthetic field is what
Aulin-Gråhamn et al. (2003; 2004) call “the market aesthetics”, a corollary of
Paul Duncum’s (2007) designer capitalism, “where the economy is no longer
thought to be based on desire so much as on the drive to continually create
evermore desire” (p. 286). It is a possible scenario that the school of tomorrow
will open the gates for designer capitalism and its need for competence
in design, media, visual culture etc. Accommodations like these, however,
will not have large effects. Market aesthetics cannot be balanced by anything
less than a transformation of how the school looks upon its mission. Here
the late-modern Western artist can serve as a role model, the group claims.
Like the art world, the school can become a democratic community with
freedom of speech, both as a human right and as an ability to communicate,
Aulin-Gråhamn and Thavenius (2003) imagine. Their vision of the school
as a classic participatory democracy, practising a democratic way of life,
reminds us of John Dewey’s ideal, inspired by the early North American settlements
and their institutions (Westbrook, 1991). By performing in the arts,
the student and his or her thoughts become “visible” and “public”, they contend.
But unlike Dewey (1911), who suggested that learning should imitate
the experimental methods used in science, Aulin-Gråhamn and co-workers
NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 59