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

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
Phenomenography and transfer
In the 1980s research into children’s conceptions of scientific phenomena
and concepts burgeoned in the Western World, including Sweden. Almost
half of more than 7,000 studies on science education, registered at a wellknown
data base in Kiel, Germany (Duit, 2006), deal with these kinds of
issues. Apart from a seminal study on “how we understand art” by Michael
Parsons (1987), and the work by David Perkins and Howard Gardner (1988)
and other members of the Harvard Project Zero, very little of this interest
has spurred research in art education. This may reflect the world-wide
tendency that “children learn to produce in art classes, but not to look at,
reflect on, or talk about art works” (Rosenblatt & Winner, 1988, p. 14). In
Sweden, Catharina Elsner (2000) carried out a phenomenological study on
“how arts teachers think”. Ann-Mari Edström (2006) presented a promising
research programme about learning art on the post-secondary level.
In her doctoral thesis, Edström (2008) used pheno menographic interviews
(Marton, 1981), and a longitudinal design, to identify those qualities that art
students develop during their professonal training.
Two studies are inspired by Elliot Eisner’s (1998) famous paper about
transfer, in which he found no good evidence of transfer between learning
in the arts and academic achievement. In discussing his findings, Eisner
stresses the need for a theory that links experience in the arts with the
acquisition of knowledge. Ylva Dahlman (2004; 2007) studied the impact
of a course in graphic arts and design for science students. She drew on the
work of several theorists to explain why the transformation of imagination
into a concrete object might invite reflection and the use of meta-cognitive
skills. Pirjo Birgerstam (2000) studied how creative Swedish architects and
visual artists tested and developed their ideas by sketching. Science educators
today are exploring the role of visual thinking, for example by using familiar
meta phors and analogies to assist the learning of scientific concepts. Peter
Aubusson and co-workers (2006, p. 8) “believe that thinking without metaphors
and analogy is like a world without pictures or a colourless landscape”.
Moreover, Elliot Eisner (1998) suggested that the effects – if effects there
are – of arts programmes on academic achievement may be due to the
motivational effects of such programmes. Lars Lindström, Johan Arnegård
and Leif Ulriksson (2003) used Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Experience
Sampling Method to find out whether students in classes specializing in
music or sports enjoyed school more than other students. No such difference
was found, however.
NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 63