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

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
The doctoral school had two “specific goals”: (a) to develop aesthetic learning
processes as a field of knowledge; (b) to support the development of research
activities at those university colleges that participated. The doctoral
school was evaluated by the Swedish Research Council, which was funding
the agency. Students who were invited to join a group of other graduate students
at their school of origin, were found to be the most successful ones.
The outcome of the doctoral school would probably have become better,
if the grant was channelled into such supportive environments. It was also
recommended that if a new doctoral school was to be implemented, more
efforts should be made to develop “aesthetic learning processes” as a field of
knowledge. The difference between learning processes and artistic creative
work in general was not made clear by the present doctoral school, as testified
both by the co-ordinator (Selander, personal communication, 2008) and
the funding agency.
Aesthetic learning strategies – a synthesis
Aesthetic learning “processes” – or “strategies” as I would prefer to say, in
order to acknowledge the intention of the subject – is a central topic in the
recent Swedish discourse on visual arts education. First, it should be noted
that there is no type of strategy that is to be preferred in every situation.
Various terms have been introduced to describe dimensions of artistic learning;
some of them are connected to more or less sophisticated theories,
others to patterns recognized in praxis; some are more ideological, others
pragmatic; some approaches are more artistic, others more scientific and so
on. The simplest way to characterize a phenomenon is to ascribe to it dichotomous
attributes like these. Yet for practical and theoretical purposes such
typologies are often too simplistic. I will here combine two dichotomous
attributes, identified in the literature, to a model with four cells (Table 3).
The model will be used to sum up the previous exposition into four types
of aesthetic learning strategies: learning about, in, with and through visual
arts and media.
The first attributes (columns) have to do with the goal, that is, what kind
of learning that is intended by using aesthetic means. The strategy is convergent
if the goal is to achieve something that is given in advance; it is divergent
if the goal rather is to combine what you know to fit new purposes. The first
kind of learning strategies refers to the mastery of the standard tricks of the
trade; while the other one is associated with creativity. On an elementary
level the following two tasks could be described as convergent: Learning
how to mix colours; learning how to draw a linear perspective. Then the fol-
NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 65